Extra context (from Wikipedia but somewhat buried):
The two judges receiving bribes were sentenced to 17.5 & 28 years in prison respectively.
The bribing company is still in operation today. One of the co-owners was sentenced to 18 months in prison for "failing to report a felony". The other co-owner at the time is now the sole owner and was not charged. His brother was and still is the District Attorney.
The fact that the bribing company is still operating and the owners or executives haven't been locked up for a long time, is plain disgusting. Executives should get locked up for the crimes they and their companies commit. Same with HSBC that only got a fine for massive money laundering.
In America, corporations are people but only when it comes to tax breaks. When it comes to criminal law, corporations are instruments of funding for lawmakers.
I don't get this. HOW do you get to this conclusion?
Directly involved:
* the District Attorney
* 2 judges
* the director of ... of the Juvenile Probation Office
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison (he was convicted, NOT because he paid off corrupt judges, but because he lied about that)
* a supreme court lawyer
Indirectly involved:
* a supreme court justice personally
* the whole Pennsylvania supreme court
* the governor of Pennsylvania
* Pennsylvania's Judicial Conduct Board
* the FBI
Clearly the problem is "corporate america". Which means, Facebook and ExxonMobil, I guess? Seriously?
All were at the very least presented with evidence this was happening (most participated in it), all refused to help obviously wrongfully convicted children.
And when this was finally dealt with? What was the problem that needed fixing? What got the ball rolling you ask? Hundreds of complaints about improper sentencing? No. The district attorney realising obvious wrongdoing happening for years, quite literally right in front of them? No.
A childish squabble over who has to do what job, by court employees, resulting in judges accusing each other. One accuses the other of "conspiring" to remove her, and infighting over shared ownership of a Florida condo ... which lead to press coverage of what one judge was accusing others off ...
Needless to say, the justice system, judges, public prosecutor, the county and the state of Pennsylvania, needed to put the blame somewhere. Somehow, not a SINGLE dollar of damages has to come from them. One might add that had this in fact been private sector wrongdoing that there would be no question that the justice department, as the employer, would have been responsible for damages caused by their employees, the judges.
So: yes, clearly everything that's wrong with America is corporations and the private sector ... not at all corrupt government, who then even refuses to take responsibility for the actions of their employees, and then used parts of the damages to fund their own operations ...
Lots of other problems, such as the crime of treating the children so badly in the juvenile facility EVEN IF they would have been correctly convicted are still, shall we say "open problems". No convictions, no attempts at fixing anything. Everything from access to medical care to the temperature of the facilities is still illegal. To save the government a buck.
Clearly capitalism is what's to blame here ... that the public sector might do enormous damage due to corruption is apparently not possible, yet it's absurdly clear this is exactly what happened here on a very large scale (thousands of children). That they're still just openly violating the law in the very same place this happened, they're still mistreating juveniles (and adult convicts for that matter).
Frankly I'd argue power needs to be taken away from these people JUST based on the pathetic childish accusations between the judges that brought this to light.
You are looking at it wrong. Everyone you mentioned there are merely following the law. It is the LAW ITSELF that fails to hold corporations accountable.
If you are still having trouble getting it, imagine corporations were called by some other name, say Mafia, and see if you'd want your law to prosecute then.
Have you read the list of people responsible? Just about every county, state and some federal law enforcement organisations were responsible. They outright refused to police themselves or other government organisations, at minimum. Mostly they actively damaged children and when they saw crimes happen, did nothing.
And here 1 private organisation (relatively small, minuscule compared to the public organisations, and with literally zero control on what happens to kids)
The private organisation was THE ONLY organisation that was held responsible to any extent at all. For the long list of public organisations that were 10x as responsible as the private company, only employees were sued.
The problem is not law, the problem is not corporations or "failing to hold corporations accountable". The problem is that law enforcement organisations don't see any need for themselves to respect the law, even when it's being blatantly violated right in front of them. And when they do get caught, they find a scapegoat employee, a few employees, that then get destroyed, guaranteeing that nothing is done for the victims of these organisations and absolutely NO effect on the organisations themselves.
The problem is failing to hold GOVERNMENT accountable when it blatantly violates the law on a large scale. And yes, they used a company as a tool in violating the law. Sorry but that's a detail.
The damage done here was estimated at $150 million. How about that amount gets paid AGAIN, this time to the victims, 50/50 out of the budget of the justice department (GREATLY impacting the district attorney's office and the court, for obvious reasons) and out of youth services' budget. That will greatly "hold the corporation accountable", no worries. This will in fact mean the victims actually get something, and the people that are guilty, that actively worked to damage those kids, get punished.
I’m sure this had no bearing whatsoever on the fact that they weren’t charged but their father just so happened to have been a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice who (coincidentally, I’m sure) retired the same year the scheme began.
One kid was locked up by these evil people for a minor drug paraphernalia charge. He spiraled after that and ended up committing suicide. The video is the mom confronting the corrupt judge and the river of BS from his lawyer.
It wouldn't. You need journalists to do that, who are both real people and real journalists. I think many of our divisions come from news sources that are either not curated by real people, or from journalists who are not real journalists.
The story was huge news when it broke. There wasn’t a conspiracy by journalists to hide it.
The problem was people as a whole didn’t care. I think it’s only very recently that more than a small minority of Americans became aware of the reality that the police and justice system aren’t always people out there doing good—they’re normal people, for better or worse. Up until we got daily police videos of cops killing innocent people, it was assumed that arrested=guilty, throw them away. Even in the face of video evidence lots of people won’t budge from the idea that the justice system had a good reason for doing heinous things.
These people believe that there is corruption in politics and politics in the workplace.
But for some reason they think that corruption in the justice system is impossible. Usually they think the same about assosiated organisations like FBI
That's during a conflict with Russia, a country where all power was seized by internal security services
The motivation of holding these beliefs is very simple, if bad things are done by the justice system to innocent (or not particularly criminal people), then there's a chance that one day the justice system does the same to you through no fault of your own. That's an unsettling idea hence rejected.
I think this is another "just world fallacy"[1] adjacent idea running rampant in our society. You see this fallacy it pop up in a lot of "woo" self-help ideas like "manifesting" or "sending out positive vibrations" as well as things like faith or spiritual healing. The basic idea being that people get what they deserve so people who experience hardship - whether legal, medical, or social - deserve it. While people who do and think good things are safe from these forces.
IMHO, this is a kind of pathological extension of "internal locus of control"[2]. Internal locus of control is good for mental health and achievement, but once you start to project it onto other people without sufficient consideration of their circumstances things quickly get problematic.
People dont care about the economics of free messaging apps or "tech monopolies", but plaster it enough across enough articles across many years of publication and suddenly it becomes an issue.
I'd argue that the NY Times and other media are the ones who dont care. They get to decide what people care about.
The gp isn't asking for automated journalism, just algorithmic promotion. You would still need real people to investigate and write; the proposed algorithm would simply sort.
I actually think this type of thing is very conceivable, but the problem is that it's not a technical challenge - it's an incentivisation one. Current algorithm creation is profit-incentive, and trivial, consumer-oriented & generally useless/inaction-driving "news" are all significantly more profitable than what the gp describes as "important".
In fact, currently many journalistic platforms & publications actively promote themselves on the basis that they already offer what the gp has asked for (which by-and-large they don't of course).
Seems like a relatively consistent, generally agreed on definition at least of 'investigative journalist' shouldn't be impossible. Something like... 'A news gatherer, who uses primary sources and triangulates investigative techniques to gather information, establish causation and contribute to understanding of emerging and ongoing news.'
Oh, I don't know, perhaps if you look at any if the huge amount of material from journalism schools on what journalism is and how it should be done, or maybe at journalism's many professional bodies and their codes of ethics, that will give you some ideas?
I would define a real journalist as someone who adds new important previously unknown facts to a story, or reports on a previously unreported story and who discloses if their sources have a vested interest in the information they've presented.
So that eliminates cable news entirely and most of the work done by NYT, WAPO etc. who basically act as a mouthpiece for government and repeat the same stories ad infinitum.
There’s a whole sub field of journalism called “curatorial journalism” or “meta journalism” that reports aggregated news that has already been reported by other outlets. This means they don’t report any new facts per se, but sometimes the combination of facts over time can color a story differently than when the facts are reported in isolation. I find this form of journalism to be very compelling.
I don't think the issue is journalists are not real journalists. The issue is that media, especially in America, is a private enterprise and is largely owned by two people. And people like collecting paychecks, so you do what your told. How many of us on HN are for privacy, but yet work in Silicon Valley writing the code that violates that same privacy? I'd wager quiet a few. And it is because we all need an income stream. Being an indie dev works for some, but not most.
those are good articles (the top 25) but the site has a left liberal bias which shows only censorship from the right. I have followed https://ground.news/ for a while which shows stories missed in what are classified as right, left and center media...
Are we really saying that a story about a world record sized pumpkin is being “censored”? Come on. At a certain point people just have to accept that “nobody cares” != “censorship”.
Dang, I guess trying to tell the world about kids getting thrown in jail for kickbacks is somehow "left liberal bias". US Conservatives have fallen so far from the Teddy Roosevelt push for small government, maintaince of our national parks, and justice for the oppressed it's actually insane
a) The attention economy. We're all overwhelmed. Filtering signal from noise is exhausting.
b) Manufacturing Consent's five filters of mass media. The economics of daily "news" determines what is covered. Yet another attention economy; and it's not clear to me that any other arrangement would be better.
c) Professional courtesy. Billionaire media moguls generally aren't going to narc on their billionaire hedge fund buddies.
--
Don't feel too bad about missing this outrage, or any other particular story. There's no shortage of outrageous stories. It's unending.
As a news junkie, from long before doom scrolling, I binge on this stuff. It's unhealthy.
Talking about it makes you sound like a lunatic to most people. Even worse, this stuff distracts you from living your best life and doing your own awesome thing.
The more effective policy people I know manage to somehow compartmentalize. Fighting the good fight is their day job, left at work. Off the clock, they do normal people stuff. The activists I know that don't do the work / life balance burn out. (Like I did.)
--
FWIW, outlets like Democracy Now!, Thom Hartmann, and Project Censored try to day light these memory hole stories.
Thanks for the work and for the fighting. It is not intuitively realized, but justice is warfare, conducted with money and information. I am borderline misanthropic and people like you make me happy.
> How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?
I've tried to figure that out myself. The best I've come up with is Wikipedia's current events page. It's not ideal, but as a bone dry, non-sensationalized summary of things going on worldwide, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it would be nice to have more context, but the linked articles usually help with that. It's biggest problem for me is it's a bit overwhelming realizing how often ferries sink and buses crash.
I did not know this existed. I've been struggling to find ways to stay somewhat aware of world events without wading through the toxicity of social media or the sentimentalization of mainstream media.
PBS NewsHour is the other source I've used because it tends to be less rage-baiting, but this fact-based presentation is great.
I’ve often thought I’d like to subscribe to the changelog of what’s taught in school, as the snapshot I received is increasingly dated by advances in science, refinements to social onboarding, and the continuation of human history.
Maybe historians would be better stewards of meaningful “news”.
I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing maximized by current increase GRAAARGGH feeling in readers algorithms, there's just so much, you were probably getting your GRAAARGGH maximized by something else.
anyway look at it this way - if the algorithms were working at giving you this important stuff in a way you were aware of it, you might have chosen a different username.
on edit: sometimes we are unaware of things just by happenstance and no algorithm tweaking will fix it, consider it a version of the XKCD 10000, I was aware of this as it passed in my feed at some point, but really if I was unaware of it I would assume it as a likely consequence of for profit prisons anyway - if asked to consider the possibility that is.
You’re wanting to optimize for something intangible, philosophical and something most people would just prefer to ignore.
Technology can still help though… look, you learned about it from HN!
However, you cannot automate this process entirely because caring, compassion and looking into the dark corners of our socioeconomic system require human judgement at every step. This human decision making, consensus forming and problem solving process is also known as ‘politics’
Just follow what the proverbial social justice people care about, a lot of it has merit before going off the rails.
You'll get familiar with a lot of broken aspects of society, much of which could take a lot of time and adjustment to understand why its not as productive as seemed. And some might seem like farfetched things to change, but you'll be familiar, especially after its old news and has been changed.
I suggest that the reason you didn’t hear about it is that you didn’t care to be informed. I live in a backwaters Canadian town and I knew about this story years and years ago. And it’s not like I do anything special to be informed: I simply scan headlines on a daily basis. The news media didn’t repress the story, you just didn’t look.
Such an algorithm would need to have a deep understanding of the human condition and how the world works in order to provide such output. I think it would basically require a full-fledged AGI (artificial general intelligence).
You might just need a large amount of click stream data from wikipedia, there is probably a cluster of people who trend to have such an awareness of the human condition. So it wouldn't require AGI to figure out a list of topics you should probably be aware of based on some sample topics. Although afaik such data is not stored by Wikimedia for privacy reasons, only less useful referrer data[1].
Another signal source might be based on the assumption that the important bits would be subject of suppression efforts, like topics that disappeared from school curriculum, internet censorship filter rules (for example [2]), takedown notices, banned books, topics journalists wrote about that were fired/defenestrated, wikipedia articles that were removed/renamed or heavily edited, unusual court cases with abnormal patterns might be recoverable from public records (like the Steven Donziger case [3]), websites on the internet archive that were taken down by infrastructure companies, there might be topics that are ignored by modern historians etc.
I don't quite understand what exactly are you saying.
I have mistakenly written "argument" instead of "algorithm" in my original post (edited now), which may have lead to a misunderstanding. Otherwise, could you please elaborate?
When this happened, the nation went through a significant financial crisis consuming almost all media headlines. Injustice sucks, but potentially losing your home and retirement is probably a higher priority to most.
For a few years we’ve had ripped from the headlines stories with bits cut out to make it believable. The tv writers say they can’t write realistic bad people who do all of the things real world bad people do. I think The Good Wife writers were one of the first to point this out.
I loved to throw around "What's next? Private prisons??" when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it's an actual thing in US. Who would have guessed. I think I was 32 at that time
The penal system in the US is perplexing. It's built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can't comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.
We didn’t get here as a modern nation. We got there because the fight to end slavery resulted in a lot of white people giving up during the Reconstruction era and allowing the South to rebuild many of the same power structures through a campaign of terrorism and political disenfranchisement during the Jim Crow era, which was only partially halted during the civil rights era and even some of those wins were later reversed under Regan and later.
The major loophole here is in the 13th amendment:
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That doesn’t work if the judicial system is unfair. There are many, many examples showing that it too often isn’t with uncomfortably close relationships between the police, prosecutors, judges, and the prison industry. This is one of the more egregious cases in recent memory because it involved children but the cases involving adults tend to get far less media coverage:
Northern doesn't mean everything is a perfect state of equality - many of the northern states were, for example, perfectly happy to profit from the raw materials produced by slaves and when black people started fleeing the south after the war, a lot of northern states had strong negative reactions. For example, one of the things which helped Irish immigrants like my ancestors get accepted into the white club was their value as cheap labor to lower black negotiating power and a lot of them were recruited into rapidly expanded police forces for the same reasons. A TON of money was poured into exploiting racial factions in the nascent labor movement since business owners saw how much less profitable things would be if there was a unified front, and that did not stop at the Mason-Dixon line.
Just a side note: the idea that Irish people weren’t considered white is a myth (same with Italians and Jews)[0]. Irish people could go to white-only venues/places, could marry other white people, weren’t affected by segregation, etc in every instance in society where you were “checked for white”, Irish people passed.
The book the myth is based on “How the Irish Became White” defines white basically as “didn’t face discrimination”, which Irish people certainly did, but never because they “weren’t white”. Obviously these are different things, and this (I think deliberately) confusing framing leads to the myth. This is just a piece of the reason why defining “whiteness” as anything other than the skin color is racist and inaccurate, and it throws a wrench into the idea that American history is just “white = free, nonwhite = all discrimination”, which is a convenient narrative but completely fabricated.
This doesn’t at all diminish the discrimination other groups suffered, but Irish people were considered white and STILL received significant discrimination (Italians and Jews too, Catholics as a religious example as well).
> Just a side note: the idea that Irish people weren’t considered white is a myth (same with Italians and Jews). Irish people could go to white-only venues/places, could marry other white people, weren’t affected by segregation, etc in every instance in society where you were “checked for white”, Irish people passed.
It's a shorthand but it's not a myth. Yes, they weren't discriminated against as badly. No, they did not have the full access to and support of society which that term is shorthand for.
(And, no, this did not start with a book which came out in 1995)
Yes, it’s a myth. 100%. There’s only 2 ways of reading “Irish people weren’t considered white”. The first is that people didn’t consider them white in the consensus definition of the word: white skin/being of white stock/white-classed ethnicity - which Irish were considered to fit this (thus the claim is a myth).
The other way of interpreting this statement is that white has any definition other than the commonly accepted one. In this case, not only has it led to so much misinformation (people genuinely think Irish people weren’t considered white people), but in this particular definition of “white” it is racist and assumes white supremacy by definition by just putting anyone discriminated against in any way as “definitely not white”, an entirely politically motivated definition, and so should be entirely disregarded.
“Irish people weren’t considered white” is a myth, it’s completely wrong. If you are trying to say something like “Irish people received more discrimination than anglo-Saxons”, then just say that rather than appropriating the term white for political purposes.
I am not the OP but believe they used the term “white” in historical context and did not “appropriate it for political purposes” in contemporary context.
Again, it's not that simple and if we're concerned about "political purposes" consider that a right-wing commenter's opinion piece arguing against against his political opponents is perhaps not exactly the complete historical consensus. For example, note how he left out things like "No Irish need apply" signs or anti-Jewish quotas or social stigma because those undercut the point.
Many of the groups we now consider white were not originally fully accepted as such. If you want to argue that we should have a different term than "whiteness" to describe that, fine, but there is plenty of scholarly usage of the term and it doesn't change the intended meaning that different groups had different levels of acceptance and, most relevantly, joining the anti-Black side tended to be an effective way to avoid one's own status being question.
By all legal stipulations, there’s no indication that Irish people were not always considered white. There is not a single instance where Irish people were denied from “white” accommodations. They were always considered to be of “white racial stock”.
They received discrimination in other ways, including for Irish ancestry, but not for being white. Do you understand how those are different? The article DID mention “Irish need not apply” signs, but that’s on the basis of ethnicity, not race.
Different groups had different levels of acceptance even today. The vast majority of Americans consider Jews to be white, but there are still people who dislike Jews. Jews receiving discrimination doesn’t make them any less white.
Even your linked article has 0 examples of Irish people not being considered white. You seem to be under the impression that being white by definition can’t receive racial discrimination, and if they do then they can’t be considered white by definition. That’s a ridiculous definition, it’s confusing, and black/Asian/etc has no kind of definition so this definition is clearly just politically motivated - it overloads a commonly understood term to smuggle in the idea that white supremacy is just true by definition and whites people never experience racism by definition. Both of which defy observed reality, making this an entirely nonsense definition.
The only valid definition of white is the commonly accepted one: of the white racial group as decided by a combination of factors including your lineage, how you are perceived, and so on. This is the same definition for any race, and under this definition: Irish people have always been considered white.
Your points about the American definitions of "white" are certainly valid. The US racial system was primarily built around creating "black" and "indian" (and later "asian"), and it's certainly arguable that Italians, Irish, and Jews were always "white" in the US under some definitions of race.
However, your definition of race is incomplete.
> defining “whiteness” as anything other than the skin color is racist and inaccurate
You are assuming that race is an objective measure, but there isn't a scientific definition of race which matches common understandings of race. Instead of accepting that people may act on a personal understanding of race, you are asserting that their definition of race doesn't match your definition, and so there's no racial component at play. Ethnicity has a habit of becoming racialized. For example:
> Different groups had different levels of acceptance even today. The vast majority of Americans consider Jews to be white, but there are still people who dislike Jews. Jews receiving discrimination doesn’t make them any less white.
Does it matter that you think that Jews are white if the Nazis did not believe that? They created racial categories for the purpose of discrimination. Jews and Slavs were subject to "racialization" by the Nazis. We can say that Jews in Europe faced racial oppression under the Nazis because the Nazis oppressed them by labeling them a race. In fact, the Nazi classification of the Jewish Race meets your updated definition:
> The only valid definition of white is the commonly accepted one: of the white racial group as decided by a combination of factors including your lineage, how you are perceived, and so on.
The problem with your insistence that the Irish and Jews are white is that there isn't an authoritative white lineage or white appearance. People disagree[1] over who's considered white.
What does “no Irish need apply” etc have to do with whiteness such that leaving it out undercuts the point? You know people can be prejudice outside of skin color right?
> For example, one of the things which helped Irish immigrants like my ancestors get accepted into the white club was their value as cheap labor to lower black negotiating power and a lot of them were recruited into rapidly expanded police forces for the same reasons.
The point was that while the Irish (or Jews, or Italians, or …) were not considered enslavable prior to the Civil War or on the Black side of the Jim Crow laws afterwards, they also were not treated as full members of society with equal access to the courts, jobs, education, etc. and one of the ways that all of those groups were able to improve their status was by joining the white side of anti-Black discrimination by taking jobs, becoming cops, keeping neighborhoods segregated, etc.
Again, the point wasn't that no other forms of discrimination have ever been practiced but that just because the Northern states fought the South didn't mean that they didn't have significant problems with anti-Black discrimination. In the context of this post, prison labor was used to fill some demand for cheap labor to replace slaves and the North was again more than willing to look the other way or profit from that labor even if it wasn't as common (or severe) in their states.
Being discriminated against in job opportunities and so on has NOTHING to do with being white. Tying them inextricably together is completely unnecessary and pollutes the conversation with borderline racism.
Being white is as simple as being black, or any other race: it’s your lineage/how you are perceived/how you identify/etc all wrapped into one and can be complicated. It is not at all dependent on your rights, or level of discrimination.
In all laws that grouped treatment on race (segregation, Jim Crow, quotas, etc) Irish people fell into the white category, every single time. Despite harsh miscegenation laws, Irish people could “intermarry” other white people without any issue - because it wasn’t intermarrying - they were all considered white. That they also received other discrimination is irrelevant to the question.
Would you suggest Irish people aren’t white even today? All the same arguments that “demonstrate” racial discrimination: longer jail sentences, lower incomes and wealth, etc for black people show Irish people trailing behind white averages too. So even though nearly every American would consider Irish people to be white, because of the discrepancy in outcomes you’d say Irish people aren’t white?
Ah, so Irish went from basically being owned in Ireland to totally accepted when they came to WASP America? Having Irish family with written family history, you can fuck off with your 'well actually' racespalining. I would say being starved to death between 1845 – 1852 because you were Irish very much refutes anything you presented.
No, Irish people aren’t and will never be WASPs, because you have to be anglo-Saxon to be White Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
Beyond that: being white and being accepted in America having little to do with each other. In every legal instance of discrimination on the basis of race (segregation, Jim Crow, etc), Irish people fell in the white category. Despite harsh miscegenation laws, Irish people could “intermarry” other white people without any issue - because it wasn’t intermarrying - they were all considered white.
This is the problem with the nonsense definition of white as “accepted in America and receiving zero discrimination”. Was JFK not white either because he was Catholic and Catholics dealt with discrimination through US history? Of course not.
Irish people have worse outcomes today vs the average for whites across incomes, wealth, interview rates, and so on. Are they still not white today?
White has a very simple meaning, like black or Asian does: it’s determined by your lineage and how you are perceived by other and yourself, with a few other factors. It’s complicated in some cases, but it has nothing to do with your level of discrimination. Do you think white people can’t receive discrimination by definition? If one is discriminated against, are they no longer white?
And you mentioned starving in the Irish Potato Famine. That was a failure of government policy and farmers breeding the same strain. The prevailing British policy was that you only received welfare benefits if you didn’t own land, and so many Irish farmers and others who needed it weren’t willing to give up their land for it. That has nothing to do with race
It’s pretty simple: the book doesn’t mean “white” like white, you know the actual definition of the word. It means “white: having the most rights”, which isn’t the definition at all and is deliberately misleading. It pretends like being white a priori makes one immune from discrimination.
Irish people were always considered white, they were also discriminated against more than anglo-Saxons. Both of these are true. The only reason this would be hard to comprehend is if you have the warped view that American history is just white supremacy (clearly many whites didn’t have it so good).
The definition of white is that same as that for any other racial group: a member of the white racial group, determined by a combination of lineage, how one is perceived, how one perceives themselves, and more. It can be complicated, and so is usually just determined by a “I know it when I see it” test, or self identification. But certain hard rules like where your ancestry is from and how your parents race is exist.
Not only is it racist, there’s also no sense in tying extra garbage like “level of discrimination” to the definition of white - it just doesn’t match up to observed reality. White people have been enslaved, white people are discriminated against in many countries where they aren’t the majority, white groups receive varying levels of discrimination even now. These facts don’t make a person any more or less white.
And too add, how many millions of Jews were killed because they were Jewish in the middle of the last century? And how many American's were fine with this? How long did America choose to be impartial to this? Again, you can fuck right off with your racist bull shit. When you are MURDERED in the MILLIONS for being Irish/Jewish, then yes, society does see you as less than human and an other. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
The issue is you’ve wrapped up so much in the word “white” that you’re confusing yourself. You seem to be under the impression that intra-racial discrimination can’t exist?
The Rwandan genocide was entirely between black people, but 2 different ethnic groups. It was a brutal genocide, ethnic discrimination to the extreme, but that doesn’t make anyone less black. Colorism exists, that doesn’t make anyone less black. WW2 was a massive violent conflict between predominantly white people. Tens of millions died, and Americans were as willing to kill Germans as Germans were to kill the British and so on. They are all white.
Being of the same race doesn’t mean there’s also massive racial solidarity at all times. White Americans today are fairly split between conservative and democrats even now. Is one group less white?
This is just a few of the contradictions created when you try to cram “discrimination” in as an aspect of being white (but not for any other race). It’s such a narrow, racist, incorrect worldview that runs against reality pretty much everywhere. It serves no academic usefulness at all except agenda-pushing
I'd like to just point out that you start finger pointing when the cause is probably much more complex than hey they did it down there and has nothing to do with us civilized folks up here. You live here and slavery hasn't been a thing for 160 years and yet this is still the state of the country's prisons.
It sounds like you’re reading something into that which I didn’t intend. My point was simply that the north wasn’t innocent and since we never fully dealt with discrimination it’s unsurprising that the problems were reduced but not fully resolved.
How did this become an issue with discrimination? My point is that the legacy of slavery could be a contributing factor, but if you keep dueling on that you miss many other insane factors that are very much at play at this very moment.
The state of prisons in the US is abhorrent and not what one would expect from a modern democratic nation, which coincidentally also claims to be the champion of freedom.
See my original comment: the 13th amendment allows involuntary servitude as a legal penalty. The problem with that is when the entire legal system has a particular bias, it's really easy to start rounding up low-status people for dubious or minor offenses when a fellow high-status peer needs cheap labor.
> Northern doesn't mean everything is a perfect state of equality
I never claimed it did. Your previous post suggested we got to this point by "allowing the South to rebuild many of the same power structures". Even if that were the whole story in the South, it does nothing to explain the situation in the North.
It's a common misunderstanding / idealization that the north wanted equality for black slaves. A very tiny minority wanted that. To the extent that northerners were against slavery (and by far not all were) that was mostly the limit of it. They did not see blacks as equal.
The same pattern applied the 60s "civil rights era", some northern liberals were against jim crow, but certainly did not want blacks moving in next door to them.
Yup. And is anyone wants further proof of the statement that the union faction wasn't exactly for complete equality, just read Lincoln's statements during his famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. While he was against slavery, he still expressed that white people were superior and would still in some fashion, rule over blacks. And that black people could not govern. He was morally against slavery, but that does not mean he thought the people who were slaves were equal.
People fly Confederate flags here all the time. There's one in the window of a house just down the street.
Just because the actual seceding states were in the South doesn't mean the racism stopped there.
The power structures the South rebuilt, they then exported ideologically. The ideals of equality the North held, they also exported ideologically.
It's very, very important to remember that there are many very right-wing people in "blue" states—just as there are many very left-wing people in "red" states. In fact, every state in the nation is some shade of "purple", with the strongest concentrations of one end of the political spectrum being around 60-70%.
> It's very, very important to remember that there are many very right-wing people in "blue" states—just as there are many very left-wing people in "red" states. In fact, every state in the nation is some shade of "purple", with the strongest concentrations of one end of the political spectrum being around 60-70%.
It's mostly an urban versus rural divide. The states with the really big and politically influential cities all reliably have their elections won by Democrats and the states without big cities, or at least without politically powerful ones, all reliably have their elections won by republicans. Needless to say, the toss-up states have something of a balance of political power.
I presume the effect is largely due to self-selection. The arrow of causality is almost certainly political orientation causing choice of where to reside. In my experience Democrat voters who move to a rural area don't become Republican voters, they become miserable and go on and on, mostly online, about just how awful everyone else around them is. One sees a similar, but less noticeable, effect with Republicans in cities.
Lest anyone believe that only Republicans do this, you should know that the two judges in the Kids for Cash scandal (Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella) were Democrats.
And several blue states (Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, Colorado ) hold many prisoners in private prisons. Others used to.
There's more involved here than "Republicans are bad people".
My memory is that after the success of the Reagan presidency, the Democratic Party (in an effort to regain power) embraced a lot of the free trade, privatization, and tough on crime ideas that had been home in the Republican Party. See the Clinton administration. So here we are.
I don't know if it's self selection. If you spend your life in the country farming, hunting, and fishing around people just like yourself, you tend to have different values than you would if you grew up in a city, surrounded by culture and variety.
The minimum wages paid to prisoners are not meaningfully different from $0. And if you are forced to work it's still slavery if they pay you some nominal amount.
People who are not in prison have to work to afford their housing, food, clothing, and other necessities.
I am not an advocate for the current state of the prison system. But I don't get why people are fundamentally against "prisoners should work to provide for themselves, just like the rest of us."
Hell, it would probably be great for rehabilitation. You could teach people how to show up for a job and manage money. Make it work like it does on the outside, and you'd have an infinitely more effective prison system.
> But I don't get why people are fundamentally against "prisoners should work to provide for themselves, just like the rest of us."
If we treat prison as a service to society it makes sense that we should pay for the service through taxes. Prison obviously isn't intended to be a service for the convicted individual so it doesn't make any sense to charge them.
If this cost is considered too high we should consider reducing the number of people we send to prison. If we can offload the cost to prisoners, those least capable of fighting back (they can't even vote!), then the sky's the limit!
> Hell, it would probably be great for rehabilitation. You could teach people how to show up for a job and manage money.
Sure, if and only if they're paid the local minimum wage and services in the prison are reasonably priced (no $25 brief phone calls, etc). Otherwise we're not teaching them to manage anything, we're just exploiting them.
To touch on your last point, yes. Prison jobs should be treated basically the same as a real world job, where practicable.
You interview for a job, you get paid a fair market rate, you get reasonable paid time off and sick time.
On the flip side of that, you also need to pay for your own lodging and food. Also at fair market rate (accounting for prison quality generally being lower means lower rent, I wager).
You could offer nicer accommodations that prisoners can upgrade to, for a higher monthly rent. And maybe the food line has different meal options. If you want to splurge one day to celebrate, you could order a steak or lobster, or something.
Yes? Locking people away IF ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY is only done for the reason of making the rest of society better. Of course we should be paying for that functionality. We shouldn't be imprisoning people to make them suffer, we should be doing it because it's literally the only possible way to keep them from harming society as a whole.
The "punishment" inherent in prison is the loss of your basic human rights, your freedom. Anything above and beyond that should be considered unethical treatment. Prison should be an incredibly boring hotel stay really.
And if you say "but then people will want to go to prison" you should think about how horrible of a world you've built where it's better to give up basic rights than participate in society.
I do. I am also OK with providing public defenders, prosecutors, judges, rehab counseling, probation, all on the taxpayer's dime. I believe the benefits to society far outweigh the costs.
People are in prison because that benefits the people outside of prison. By locking up serial killers, the people outside of prison are safe but the people inside prison are not.
> People who are not in prison have to work to afford their housing, food, clothing, and other necessities.
No, people need money to afford their housing, food, clothing, etc. Most people acquire that money through labor, but they can select between a variety of employers and quit whenever they want.
Well the argument that "prisoners should be expected to do the same things non-prisoners do" really breaks down when you acknowledge that their circumstances are fundamentally different from those outside of prison.
And as for why freedom to choose their job should be different, we sort of agreed as a society quite some time ago that slavery is wrong.
There’s the whole, well, imprisoned aspect, then there’s the profit aspect, where the company literally have captive employees, which changes a whole dynamic of the workplace, these people cannot quit
Also, cheap prison labor can undercut the market, so you may feel that modern slavery can lower your own wages.
Work rehabilitation programs can work, but prison for profit is bound to invite abuse
Someone - let alone a private corporation - telling you where you are allowed to live, what you are allowed to eat, and what you will do with your labor every day - is not comparable to living as a free man even if you still need to work to pay rent. It is just not remotely comparable. Then you get into US incarceration's history being tangled up with slavery and it looks even worse.
> Someone - let alone a private corporation - telling you where you are allowed to live, what you are allowed to eat, and what you will do with your labor every day - is not comparable to living as a free man even if you still need to work to pay rent.
At what point do you think being in prison should differ from being free then?
In the model I imagine, the prison is not necessarily involved in dictating what jobs there are. There may be _some_ jobs where you work for "the prison" (janitorial stuff, or a cook).
But there are plenty of other things prisoners could do if reasonable accommodations were made. Making widgets, for example.
Also, taking the "prisoners must work" piece out of the equation doesn't really solve any of those problems.
I think it could only work if their charges didn't follow them out into the real world and they made meaningful wages with the company who contracts through the prison willing to go to bat for them when they are released. The reality is, these people go to prison to be "rehabilitated." They provide a cheap labor stream. Then when their time is up, they come back to the real world and either have a difficult time being hired or no one will hire them because of their record, so they end up doing crime because, brother has to eat to live, then they wind back up in prison as a cheap labor source. The wages paid are meaningless, so there is not a real way to save up a nest egg for when they get out and on their feet.
The best thing that recently has happened in this regard is California saying they will consider people who did fire fighting during their jail time will get real consideration to work for Calfire if they apply for openings. Which is awesome since these people already have some basic experience and training.
It is crazy what we allow prisoners do and then they can't get hired for it. My father in law for awhile during his one of his prison sentences worked with EMTs, but yet on release, has no pathway to employ the skills he learned.
I’m not sure if it’s like this everywhere in USA, but usually prisoners need to pay for lots of necessities from their own money, like the rest of us - except they get higher prices, because economy.
“Nearly two-thirds of all prisoners in the US, which imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, have jobs in state and federal prisons. That figure amounts to roughly 800,000 people”
Worst possible conditions? Seriously? It’s the worst conditions that can possibly exist. Nothing could be worse than being in a prison in the United States?
On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. It’s not a vacation, it’s jail.
I read that as "worst possible conditions as legally allowed". So no, they are not "the" worst conditions imaginable, but they are as bad as the system allows. Which is still pretty bad.
>>On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects.
No one is arguing against that. The problem is that prison populations are being used for profit making - anyone can contract with a prison to use their labour to make whatever thing you want to do or make. So companies use prisoners to make products that they then sell for profit. Which obviously creates perverse incentives for prisons to have a large workforce they can hire out for profit. No one is arguing against using prisoners to clear out public pathways or whatever.
>> It’s not a vacation, it’s jail.
Also, I just want to say I'm not a fan of this argument because people use it to excuse all kinds of things. "People get beaten up in prison? It's not a vacation, it's jail". "Prison rape happens? It's not a vacation, it's jail". And so on and so on. Like, yeah, it's not a vacation, but a basic standard of human dignity should be allowed.
> I read that as "worst possible conditions as legally allowed".
Why should conditions be any better than what is legally required? If you have a problem with what the law requires, fine. The law should describe some reasonable standard.
But making jail conditions "better" doesn't happen by magic. It requires effort and it costs money.
Do you think the purpose of prison is primarily to rehabilitate prisoners into society or to give just, deserved punishment for offenses to society?
If you agree with the former, then making conditions better than the legal baseline could humanize the prison population and increase their chances and motivation to reassimilate themselves into society.
If you agree with the latter, then I don't see a good argument for bettering the conditions of prisoners.
From a basic utilitarian standpoint, it seems very clear that policy guided by the the rehabilitation principle will result in better outcomes than policy guided by the punishment principles.
I agree with neither of your false dichotomy points. The purpose of prison, first and foremost, is to protect society from people who are dangerous.
Rehabilitation is secondary to that.
Additionally it is important to call out that humane does not mean nice or pleasant. Prison does not need to be cruel. But it should absolutely not be something that people enjoy, because then you create perverse incentives.
Sure, and I mean even I can make some convincing arguments against it too - but(in my experience) that's not what most arguments are about, it's about the profit motive and exploitation, not about "putting people to work on public works projects". Maybe I shouldn't have said "no one", that's my bad.
> Nothing could be worse than being in a prison in the United States?
When taking a dump on the US, whether it's the rate of maternal death, incarcerations, prison conditions or school shootings or whatever, it's usually only relevant to compare to a subset of rich and democratic countries.
Of course there are places with more murders and worse prisons. The question is if it's reasonable that the country with one of the highest GDPs per capita and the best universities in the world does.
Japan has way more brutal prisons, but you can also leave your bicycle unlocked outside of your office building all day and reasonably expect it to still be there when you go home.
Are you under the impression that working on public works and construction in general is a "vacation"?
Your thought process implies that you want even harsher conditions for prisoners that regularly are starved, show up in cells dead from lack of water or beaten and left to die, where rape is used a joke, and recidivism increases because we refuse to hire or integrate people into our society post crime.
How much torture should people endure to satisfy your need for punishment?
Imagine that your boss is also your prison guard, and that his pay and bonuses are not paid based on being a prison guard but on your output. As someone who was in the Feds and and who saw the people around him forced to work even with severe injuries, sickness, COVID, because they had to meet the UNICOR contract that said they would deliver X widgets, it is literal slavery. Our COVID rules were based around UNICOR output not good COVID guidance, to the point the CDC had to take over running the prison. You can not complain, or you will be put in a cell with very intimidating guys, and your cell will be shaken down every day because you are in it and are causing trouble, which will be make clear to your cellies, and your cellies will 'have a talk' with you about causing trouble. If you continue, you will get 'diesel therapy'. Sure, you have access to the courts, once your diesel therapy is over, and 10 months later the court will start to respond, the BOP will say they changed XYZ, the court will say in that case the inmates challenge is now moot and rule against you.
There was a very good LT (cop of lieutenant level) (strict, super cop type, but he followed the rules and you knew what you got, which is what you want in prison) transferred to UNICOR. He quit the BOP prior to getting his very very generous retirement package because he could no longer accept how UNICOR treated people (not inmates, people).
The punishment is deprivation of liberty. I regard that as already an extreme punishment, entailing as it does the loss of your job, and like as not the loss of your family. You are also deprived of the means to defend yourself, despite being surrounded by violent people who wish you harm. I don't think anyone should ever be incarcerated, unless there is no choice - i.e. for the protection of society.
I findit remarkable that a country that proclaims itself as the beacon of capitalism, skews the labour market by hiring-out compelled, unpaid labourers. That's not how I was taught that well-regulated markets are supposed to work.
Imagine a corporation who's sole goal is to maximise it's profits based on judging if people/corporations have broke the law, or not! Surely they'll be more efficient than public courts. What could go wrong?
You mean like (quasi-)forced arbitration, as spear headed by the US.
Let's be honest the US has sold out the mental, physical and economic well being of most of it's populations for the benefit of a handful of especially wealthy citizens. Worse it wasn't even done with long term geo political benefits or anything like that in mind, actually the opposite if anything. I.e. just pure greed.
Have you ever been involved in litigation? I have and it would have saved me a year of bullshit an $100k of legal fees if the contract I was litigating had a forced arbitration clause.
Evidence for this bias is scant. Instead, complaints centre around perceptions [1], which while valid, need to be balanced against the constraint to launching litigation in the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs.
Based on that narrow quote, it's unclear whether you're disagreeing with the perceptions about litigation or arbitration. My position is simply that we know there are biases affecting access to the court system (especially with a class component where people aren't sure/aware of their full range of options) but also that large companies are enthusiastically pursuing arbitration for reasons unlikely to be improved fairness, especially since the end stage for arbitration is litigation.
The main thing I'd like would be chipping away at the take-it-or-leave it approach we see currently, which is in line with that article's points around choice. Expanding the range of choices and, especially, allowing people to switch in the future would go a long way towards avoiding an unhealthy power dynamic.
The obvious reason that large companies want arbitration is because it's cheaper. People file frivolous lawsuits against large companies all the time, and since it costs minimum $100K in legal fees to take a case to trial, these companies (or their insurance companies) will generally choose to just settle and make a payout because it's actually cheaper than going to court, even if they win. Arbitration is a much quicker and cheaper process, so it effectively counters the tactic of filing frivolous suits for greenmail payments.
Companies also routinely _claim_ that lawsuits are frivolous but that doesn't mean we should take their word on it. It's not even remotely true that it costs a minimum of $100K, so I would start by questioning whether the person who told you that had an ulterior motive.
I know that there are tons of frivolous greenmail lawsuits because I have been at companies on the receiving end. I know how much lawyers cost through personal experience. What is your evidence? What are your motives?
Isn't this why companies love Delaware, Hong Kong, and Singapore? AFAIK the courts in these jurisdictions are fast and uphold the rule of law (contract law included).
I doubt Hong Kong is that way today. Virtually every other aspect of Hong Kong civil administration is now the same as China's, or subverted to be the same.
The UK has private prisons: 14 out of a total of 117 are privately-run, apparently.
I have no idea of what influence the operators are able to bring to bear on the government; the government we have at the moment is shamelessly corrupt, so I assume it's widespread and invisible.
Well, occasionally people who abuse people in private prisons get put to justice. This is generally made difficult by ... of course ... the public part of the system (here we have involved: judges, a supreme court justice, the public prosecutor and the governor. It's about as public as it gets, the private prison was just a way to get the money out. The corrupt parts were very thoroughly publicly funded. And of course the vast majority of the corruption (ie. the public prosecutor, who was the real central part of it) got of without any consequences)
The prison with the worst reputation (deserved or not) is still Riker's island. And it's very much public. It has had it's share of corruption cases, but nobody was ever punished.
And since people seem to really care about this part: Riker's island is very, very much violating the law constantly about the conditions. Everything from medical care, maximum occupancy, to temperatures (both in summer and in winter). The law is very clear: that means no more prisoners there until these issues are fixed. But that would cost money. So, of course, everybody in the justice system cooperates to violate the law. That, by itself, regardless of anything else, is a crime.
What's oxymoronic about it? Public prison is prison run by the government, as opposed to a private company, similar to public schools and public transportation systems.
A better example of the strange use of the word "public" is in England, where "public schools" specifically means "private schools"... or more specifically the subset of privately-run secular boarding schools that opened to any member of the public that could afford for their sons to attend, long before state schooling became a thing.
lol it’s so absurdly passively aggressively phrased nobody is buying it. This dude wants to debate if public really is a synonym of open or not, when the GP said “almost oxymoronic” what a mind job
Isn't the GP you? You said "almost oxymoronic". Also, I'd expect the offices of the Tax Authority to be public property, but I wouldn't expect to be able to visit any of them any time I wanted, so "public" very concretely does not mean "open", it just means "owned by the commons".
The sheer idiocy of trying to teach a Greek what "oxymoron" means tells me that I probably shouldn't waste the crayons it takes to explain things to you.
The sheer idiot Greek who thinks that race gives him more credibility in a debate (excuse me, petty squabble) on semantics than actual dictionary and thesaurus citations, both of which clearly disprove his ludicrous arguments.
Re: privatization of public services, I would love to see writing up parking tickets outsourced to private companies. It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones), yet no country I've heard of does that. It really shows that the world is completely dominated by car culture at the moment. Politicians are just affraid of having too good parking rules enforcement, as they suspect most of their electorate are drivers and would actually hate it. As a result, we have cities littered with cars parked at places where they cause problem for everyone (it's less of a problem in the US, because many US cities are basically parking lots with buildings in the middle - so there's no need to park illegally).
Trust me, you really wouldn't. This incentive structure has existed previously in the UK and it lead to precisely the degenerate outcomes you might imagine. What you want is fewer cars
I once sat in a phone queue for 3 hours to dispute a charge that I received due to signage that was obstructed by trees. There's no incentive to handle disputes so they effectively don't. There's also hundreds of different companies each with their own rules and systems. Most of the time I'll park 3 or 4 miles out of the city and walk in rather than dealing with crappy parking companies.
It's more like a government oversight in food industry: you're free to reap the benefits, but if you get too many complaints you'll be shagged by a hefty fine.
Easily the most iconic privately funded organisation associated with parking tickets and enforcement would be the Queensland (Australia) Surfers Paradise Meter Maids :
> Unlike other meter maids, who issue parking tickets to motorists when they overstay, Gold Coast meter maids put money into parking meters which might otherwise expire, preventing vehicle owners from incurring a fine. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work.
Say what now??
> The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council.
] In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council agreed to lease Chicago’s parking meter business for 75 years and in return received $1.15 billion from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a venture that includes Wall Street investment house Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
It also mentions:
] Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals because of Chicago’s difficulties, according to Bloomberg Business News. Unlike
Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ticket there is no incentive for them to do "a great job". Because the model of all of these systems is that the private "efficient" entity gets a %age of the expenses that they inflict on people, but any cost from subsequent lawsuits are borne by the public.
There are seemingly obvious ways of countering that, such as included mandatory upper limits on ticket contest rates. Are these not part of the contract? Who enters into contracts with no provision for actually delivering the service at an acceptable level?
People focus on the dollar amounts for contesting tickets, but more likely the problem is time.
If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”.
Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
That's the case for government run ticketing as well. Even if only a small percent of people contest unfair tickets, you can use that as an indicator of how many unfair tickets are being issued. If it goes up under private ticketing, and assuming you don't change the method for contesting, the odds are good that they are doing something to cause it. Hence you could write a service level agreement that says something like "Percent of issued tickets which are contested shall not vary beyond x% from y (the prior rate). Percent of successfully contested tickets will not vary beyond z%", etc.
To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
No it's not, that's the point - a private company has a single goal: making money. It isn't in the interest of a company that gets revenue proportional to tickets issued to, for example, ensure that parking restriction signs are visible, etc.
A city obviously has _some_ incentive to get more money from tickets (in the US see things like ticket revenue requirements, "civil forfeiture"/theft, distributing the received assets to the orgs issuing the tickets, stealing property, etc). But the city also has actual non-revenue reasons as well - for example I have received multiple parking tickets around my house over the last few years because there are parking restrictions to allow street cleaning, etc (the problem isn't the signage, it's the forgetting about the restrictions, and them being "2nd and 4th Tuesday" on one side of the street and "1st and 3rd Tuesday" on the other).
Similarly traffic tickets say are intended to make roads safer by discouraging speeding, etc (although they functionally just mean speeding is allowed if you are rich).
Using speeding tickets as an example, it is in the interests of an organization that receives revenue from tickets that people do speed. On the other side various governments have a real interest in not having crashes, etc as that has impact on the economy, it impacts voters, etc. But even this depends on the people enforcing traffic laws not being corrupt - and gov agencies getting any funding from tickets creates an obvious moral hazard. In California at least you get the CHP getting significant funding from ticket/fine revenue, and as a result of this the CHP does not maintain visibility while speed checking, but instead hides. The former results in people not speeding, the latter means that they get to issue tickets.
An illogical extreme of this would be to set the speed limit for a freeway below the design speed for said freeway - this is a particularly subtle one: most research shows that people will tend towards driving at the designed speed of a roadway, so you can create an environment where the default behavior is "breaking the law" giving you a limitless source of income. Honestly, it's why things like speeding tickets, etc should be required to have all fines sent to a separate account (say victim support or something) where the relevant agencies can't use the income directly or indirectly.
This is why the incredibly hated traffic cameras are infinitely superior to manual speed checking - fixed cameras in locations where speeding is dangerous are, well, fixed. This means that even if people do speed, they learn to avoid speeding in places it's particularly dangerous, if only to avoid guaranteed tickets.
And what are the incentives of the people in the government agency? You seem to assume that absent financial incentives they will behave altruistically. I would argue that part of the reason agencies have those financial incentives is to give them a reason to perform that task at all. Government employees are not a cadre of uniformly civic minded people. Just like everyone else, they tend to seek to maximize their own benefit. Without financial incentive, it can be other motives, like the desire for power or to avoid work.
As an example, a friend of mine was engaged to a fellow who worked as a mailman in New York. His mail route took him 2 hours to complete, but officially it took him all day. After he completed his mail route, he'd go to the gym, run errands, etc, then show up at the end of the day to clock out. Apparently he was far from alone in this. The mail routes had been established long before and were passed on from carrier to carrier, none challenging the fiction that gave them so much free time. Their supervisors must have been aware of this given how long it had been going on, but apparently they had no incentive to interfere.
Another example: there was a precinct in the Bronx many years ago where the police would fulfill their parking ticket quota by going down a block and issuing tickets to every car, regardless of meter state. People who lived in the area were aware of this and regularly contested the tickets. Eventually someone noticed that the contest rate was extremely high and almost always successful and they got in trouble. They apparently felt no incentive to ensure that their ticketing raised revenue for the city or encouraged meter use. Their sole motive was meeting the quota.
I could list many other examples of where government employees, without incentives to do their job, did them poorly or not at all. High profile ones like the police are actually more accountable than many of the smaller agencies. In my experience it's not unusual to find yourself waiting for days for a person to sign a piece of paper which is sitting on their desk. Clearly that person is not being evaluated on whether your needs get attention and no other motive is at play. But this is actually one of the more successful outcomes. In many places, bribery is necessary to get people to do their job.
In short, incentives are always a problem, public or private. In order to get things done well, it is necessary that incentives are constructed properly. That takes effort and instances of failure to do it properly abound for both public and private institutions.
> It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones)
Congratulations; you've essentially re-invented tax farming, as was popular in the Roman Empire.
We know from _literally millennia_ of bitter experience that giving private companies a cut of whatever they manage to extract from the general public is a very bad idea. If you pay someone more the more they abuse the rules (these things are virtually impossible to police), then you can't be surprised when they break the rules.
So instead of having an entity to do the ticketing, you propose to have an entity to validate that the ticketing done by the 3rd party is valid? Does not seem to solve anything.
Not validate, only handle disputes. The dispuses will be a small minority of all cases, and, as usual, the onus of the proof will fall on the accuser, i.e. private company. So, they either must have a good documentation (photos etc.) proving the infraction, or the ticket gets overthrown and they themselves get fined for wasting everybody's time.
I don't think this was really viable in the pre-smartphones era, but now every private parking cop can (and would be required to) take copious photos with a cheap device. This should really minimize any shadiness in the system.
You might have heard of France, I guess? The city where I live uses (Suresnes, just next to Paris) uses a private company to manage parking tickets in street parking; but I've got no idea how the incentives are structured and how well (or not) it works
TFDR (Too French, didn't read): Basically, across all media, including the "Figaro" (notorious right-wing paper who often push for privatization), this isn't going that well.
In Finland, at least, this is a thing. Parking enforcement is partially given to private companies but I don't know how it works with the underlying mechanisms (i.e. whether they are getting a fixed sum, or whether they get a fraction of the fines they fine).
That would incentivise behaviour similar to police in the US using fines and civil forfeit to augment their budget. It's a perverse incentive that encourages lying to increase fines, and good luck challenging it.
This is always stated as something bad, but perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?
A similar argument can be made about health spending: if it's low then we are not doing enough, but if it's high then we are spending too much (i.e. we are inefficient), when in fact we might be allocating more capital to it because we value it more.
> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?
The real question should be *why is the US "a violent society"? I think your post is a good example of what I think the problem in the USA is: the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys. But it's not like that. Violence, including incarceration, brings other violence. Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence. The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence. But it doesn't do so for ideological reasons connected to this belief of good vs. bad.
Sorry if I used your comment as an example, I do not mean it as an attack. But do ask yourself, why is the US a violent society and not Switzerland?
> the belief that the world is divided up in good guys and bad guys and you just need to lock up all the bad guys.
Reminded me of this quote:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
OT but does anyone have this quote in what I presume is the original Russian?
edit: Found it: Если б это было так просто! — что где-то есть чёрные люди, злокозненно творящие чёрные дела, и надо только отличить их от остальных и уничтожить. Но линия, разделяющая добро и зло, пересекает сердце каждого человека. И кто уничтожит кусок своего сердца?
> Poverty, inequality, ignorance, lack of health support for drug users, all bring violence.
This is certainly not generally true. There are many countries with much greater poverty, inequality, and ignorance (at least measured by education) than the US that have much less violent crime. I'd imagine having more drug users per capita has a significant effect on violent crime everywhere however.
The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.
Any country with those two factors will have a problem with violence; the fact that the US is the most civilized country among that list (and likely sits atop that list) is what is so damning.
The largest single chunk of the violence is just the settling of drug industry business disputes. If the people doing the shooting had badges and got their pay stubs on state letterhead most people here wouldn't blink twice.
Whereas you may lean on an expensive and complicated court system to send an employee of the state to apply violence (or threats thereof) to someone who had wronged you until they right their wrong people in the drug industry has no such luxury since their disputes will not he heard by a court. Likewise they must DIY it. That means home invasions, shootings, etc, etc.
Back before people in these lines of work shot at each other (have you ever tried doing a drive by on horseback with a 6 shooter, doesn't work very well) over these sorts of disputes people would round up friends and beat each other up or people would torch houses.
Bringing our massive illegal economy out of the shadows would clean up a huge fraction of the violence by replacing a lot of it with threat of state violence. See prohibition for an example of the reverse case.
I was thinking of Indonesia, only because I lived there for a while, but those are factors in nearly every country.
> The violence is fueled by two things: income inequality and the prevalence of guns.
I don't think either of these are what cause the violence (maybe they throw fuel on the fire as you're saying though). People can be just as violent without weapons, and just as greedy when they are on the top. They just become more dangerous with money, guns, and lawyers.
Ok. What exactly are you trying to imply? It's hard to draw conclusions from your gaps, it's pretty clear that you are saying that young African-American men commit more violent crimes per capita.
What should I draw from this though? That the USA has a violent history with slavery and segregation and those scars haven't been healed, that the government hasn't figured out a way to fix this historical issue?
Or should I draw some other conclusion that I prefer to not type out because it'd be too disgusting to even entertain it?
Probably the only safe thing to say with these facts in mind is that we haven't found a solution to this problem that both reduces the crime output of those likely to commit it, and also treads carefully across our collective sensitivities surrounding the topic.
Maybe that's an impossible task given those requirements. If it were easy, we'd probably have found the solution by now. We're pretty sensitive about numbers like that after all, to the point that I'm generally reluctant to quote them.
> Probably the only safe thing to say with these facts in mind is that we haven't found a solution to this problem that both reduces the crime output of those likely to commit it, and also treads carefully across our collective sensitivities surrounding the topic.
It's certainly the thing to say if you don't feel like actually changing anything.
The main reason behind the disparity in crime demographics become fairly apparent when you compare them to the statistics on poverty demographics. Research shows a correlation between poverty/income inequality and rate of violent crime. It follows that reducing the crime rate, regardless of demographic, is a matter of raising people out of poverty and reducing the level of societal inequality.
> If it were easy, we'd probably have found the solution by now.
Quite frankly, most countries haven't even tried looking for one. Most prison systems only put people through a process that only makes them more likely to reoffend. The insane thing about this is we know that some places are better but we make excuses and refuse to change.
The problem is not with stating the facts. Because facts and numbers have no meaning in themselves.
The problem comes from the things that you're supposedly implying. This isn't entirely your fault, because this line of thinking is brought up again and again. People know what someone is trying to say if someone just pulls up this kind of statistic. Your fault (if it's an honest mistake) is not being aware enough of the discussion around this topic and the lack of articulateness in your comment.
"The FBI is racist": ever heard of COINTELPRO? I think trying to undermine the civil rights movement (among others) could be classified as racist, do you not agree?
Also "FBI crime stats" is probably one of the loudest dog whistles, more like a fog horn at this point.
If we're erecting dumb strawmen, let me erect one in the shape of the parent comment - African-Americans are over-represented in crime, because they're just like that. Quod erat dumbonstrandum.
All of which were mentioned by a grandparent comment, then quoted and commented on as being insufficient to understand "who" is committing crime, by the person I was replying to.
If you can't see what their gist was, well, that's a you thing.
Nope. Grandparent comment asked why the US is a violent society. Absolute top comment on the chain is just outright incarceration numbers. No one asked anything about race until you came along.
Crime statistics split by demographic are commonly used as a dog whistle by racists. The people posting them typically aren't interested in discussing the reasons behind a particular demographic committing more crime beyond asserting that it's due to inherent traits.
That those statistics were posted as a dog whistle is backed up by the user's other posts.
On Portugal's African colonies:
> The only thing to apologize is to ourselves. We should haver never went there and left you in the stone age.
> All the infrastructure we left you weren't able to maintain, as it happened with 99% of the African countries.
> Total mystery why.
Casual quotation marks around youngsters:
> And now robbing stores is becoming rampant as we can all testify by the loads of videos of "youngsters" entering stores and taking what they want without anyone doing anything.
Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos?
These are hard problems and can't be imagined away with "The US would definitely have enough money to turn deprived neighbourhoods into less deprived communities, which means less violence".
We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA. If that's the world you want to live in, all the best (but it won't be long before you start running for the exit).
It’s interesting that you bring up theses specific questions. Ask yourself: why is the U.S. riddled with violent gangs? Why is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states? Why do large chunks live in inner city crime-infested ghettos (and why are there ghettos in the inner cities in the first place)? Many would argue that all these are home-made problems. Imprisoning the victims of this system can’t conceivably be the solution, and might in fact only make it worse (mass imprisonment has many bad societal effects).
Your government policy has turned your cities into crime infested ghettos. Even diverse and poor countries like India are managing to avoid this problem.
US doesn't have some magical and unique set of challenges, apart from political disfunction, that can't be found anywhere else in the world.
> We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF
I must have missed something - SF solved the housing crisis, everyone could get a an education and a decent job but crime remained?
> Is Switzerland riddled with violent gangs? Is it bordered by failed narco-controlled states that continuously smuggle people and drugs into the country? Does it have big chunks of the population living in inner city crime-infested ghettos?
Why does the US have these problems? They didn't come from nowhere.
> We saw what well-meaning but supremely naive ideologically-driven policies lead to, in SF and Chicago and Seattle and LA.
If memory serves, the rise in incarceration rates can be traced back to the failed war on drugs, which incarcerated many non-violent (often black) offenders. There is also a tough-on-crime stance, in part due to the fact that US sheriffs and judges compete in local elections, leading to aberrations such as mandatory minimum sentencing.
As for health spending, a lot of the spending can be traced to inefficiencies, and predatory pricing by hospitals, drug companies, and medical device manufacturer. The lack of centralized information for insurance and payments (note that I don't blame insurers) also creates huge administrative costs.
Those are both complex topics, so I don't claim to have captured all aspects, and I may have some of the details wrong, but I would say it's a good first approximation.
The US is probably more violent than other western countries, but I think the real problem are the much harsher sentences for comparable crimes (citation needed).
There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration. The legality of the death sentence is a clear violation of human rights, for example.
I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.
> There's much more of a focus on punishment instead of reintegration.
Yup, this is a cultural thing. In the US, people (in general) want criminals to be punished, they don't put too much value in rehabilitation. It's very different from many European countries which is visible in sentencing.
> I haven't encountered evidence that would suggest that the US is better at preventing crime than others.
On the contrary, there's much more crime in the US than most western countries. Whether this has anything to do with punishment vs rehabilitation is impossible to say though. I personally think that lack of many social services is more to blame. Things like social security, public housing mixed with private, health care, workers rights, et cetera mean less people end up in criminality in the first place.
Recidivism rates unfortunately are extremely hard to compare due to the methods and sentencing being extremely different.
"There's more crime" is a meaingless claim unless you define what "crime" is and how you measure how much there is of it. Jaywalking is a crime in some countries. Does a country that criminalizes jaywalking have more crime than one that doesn't if it has any people jaywalking? How do you measure crime which is underreported or not enforced consistently?
If the US has a higher incarceration rate it's extremely likely that it has "more crime" because incarceration is supposed to be a punishment for doing crimes. The question is how the definition of those crimes compares to other countries. E.g. do you consider possession of cannabis a crime because it is illegal on a federal level? Former US President Bill Clinton used cannabis before it was legalized in any US state, so was that a crime?
For a real world case of this nebulous concept of "crime" as an opaque quantity consider immigration: even if they commit fewer violent crimes, it's still entirely possible for an immigrant to be more prone to crime simply because they are subject to additional legal requirements citizens aren't and failing to comply with any of them may qualify as a criminal offense. Just by their legal status they are able to commit an entire category of crimes others can't. Whether you think that is justified or not, they can literally be criminals for behaving exactly the same way as a non-criminal citizen would.
You might be interested in listening/reading a recent Planet Money episode (https://www.npr.org/2022/09/22/1124477182/federal-judges-eco...), which explains how for ~20 years or so, many US federal court justices went to an exclusive, all expense paid economics bootcamp, taught by some of the most well known economics thinkers of the time. That sure sounds great in theory - why wouldn't you want to have judges to have a deeper understanding of economics when they can have impact on financial matters?
Well, as it turns out, some of the key ideas taught focused on the rational economic theory, and extrapolated from there to crime and punishment - e.g.: a criminal makes a cold economic calculation before commit each crime, taking into account the expected gain from this crime, the likelihood of getting caught, the expected punishment if caught, etc. - and therefor, if we make the "cost" higher, by opting for harsher prison sentences - crime will become less attractive and therefore happen less.
When the data is analyzed, justices that went through this program appear to hand out harsher sentences to offenders, and often rule in favor of corporations and against government agencies when compared to the control group. The effect is most evident for judges that used to learn more to the liberal side, which is surprising to me, but it definitely is interesting.
The US also doesn't have mandatory inpatient mental health care (or at least this has been severely downsized since the 1970s). How much of the numbers can be explained by other countries have higher rates mental health care institutionalization, while the US has shifted most of these people to prisons?
I found some numbers: according to Statistica, Europe has 275 mental health 'hospital admissions' per 100,000, whereas the Americas have 41.8. That could be entirely enough to explain the difference in prison populations, but of course one would need data on the length of the average mental health hospitalization. It also doesn't explain the comparison to other regions with lower incarceration and lower mental health treatment rates, which is pretty much the entire rest of the world.
The US also doesn’t have optional inpatient mental health care, for many people. There are simply no beds available, even for people who have been ordered there by a court.
> perhaps the US is a violent society and it is doing a good job at keeping the violent behind bars?
Most crime pays terribly, being a street drug dealer barely pays minimum wage and involves immense risk. Opportunities for some in the US are so bad that they choose terrible jobs (high risk, bad pay) at far higher rates than people do in other countries. Jobs that, in addition, come at a moral/reputational cost (your family is angry at you, other careers are closed off to you once you have a record.)
> perhaps the US is a violent society
What does this even mean? Of course it is a violent society. This is just a vague innuendo that this violence is impossible to fix and intrinsic to the US; it's just question-begging.
The US is perhaps a "violent society" but our crime rates have been trending down over the last few decades, while spending on prisons has not trended down accordingly. We could be spending that money on valuable social programs.
Based on the number of people in US jails and prisons who are awaiting trial - not even convicted of a crime - or there for minor offenses due to policies like "three strikes", it's hard to argue that massive incarceration is actually what's making us safer.
For comparison, number #2 on the list (Rwanda) had a genocide involving tens of thousands of people hacking each other to death with machetes, and 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide. They also like to imprison anybody even vaguely suspected of opposing the current government. So you have the double combo of lots of genuine genocidaires plus a paranoid police state, and they still have less people in prison per capita than the US.
> 26,000 of their 43,000 prisoners were convicted of various crimes related to this genocide.
This is a general charge in Rwanda, which is a dictatorship still run by the commander of the ethnic army that sparked the genocide by killing the president and massing at the border to invade. They recently imprisoned the guy Hotel Rwanda was about as a terrorist. And like you say, they're still less of a police state than the US.
Perhaps it is a violent society because of a deeply-ingrained fear of violence. Frightened people are more likely to assume a situation is threatening, and respond with violence. And imprisonment is a form of violence; nobody voluntarily takes themselves off to prison on judge's orders. The more likely you are to be imprisoned, the more likely you will risk a shoot-out with cops.
There seem to be a lot of people in the USA that take a strongly retributive attitude to justice: e.g. "Close the prisons, criminals should just be shot like mad dogs".
The purpose of a criminal justice system is to protect the public by enforcing the law, not to embody some moral posturing about the fruits of wickedness.
I have always thought that the US should lock less people and start handing less harsh sentences, but having lived in the bay area for almost 6 months, I came to the conclusion that the US should lock up even more people.
I understand that prisons don't necessarily fix the crime problem, but the thing we probably all agree on is that fixing crime is not something trivial at all, and until we know the exact causes of crime, and start to tackle them one by one, we need to do something immediate about crime because life here is frankly unbearable. Random shootings, shoplifting, assault, hate crimes, and muggings are all too common here.
I'm unable to even think about starting a family in this environment.
That page also notes this shocker but it also quotes itself as a source at one point, so is it a decent source (?):
"The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide ... This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000"
It's just stating that the source said 2M, which combined with the total population yields 629. Nothing wrong with drawing a simple conclusion from two sources. The sources for the prisoner numbers are clearly labeled at the bottom of the page:
Might be a difference in how people in jail (vs prison) get counted?
Not sure if other systems have a similar distinction?
For non US people: Jail is run by the local (usually county) government and is for minor(ish) crimes like writing bad checks, failing to appear in court, DUIs, reckless driving, things like that.
More importantly jail is where people are held before they are sentenced/found guilty. They are also yes used for shorter sentences. But you can still be jailed for years before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
Wikipedia has slightly different numbers[0], with El Salvador instead of Rwanda at #2, but the fact remains that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Though it seems to have gone down slightly; I recall that a few years ago it was over 700/100,000.
> The crazy thing is that mass incarceration is relatively new in the US.
Indeed. Before the massive explosion in violence and disorder the US pioneered in the 60s the First World was substantially more peaceful. Less need for incarceration with much lower rates of crime.
It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment.
> It took until 1980 for incarceration rates to start their upward climb. Ten years is a remarkably long time for a doubling of murder rates to take to show up in imprisonment.
This is extremely dubious. The vast majority of people in prison are not there for murder. From a search, 15% of people in prison have a murder on their record. It's not TV.
Here they quote U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2020 with around 1.7M of prisoners. That's about 15% lower than that number, but still quite high.
It's also worth noting that the rate per 100k people can artificially inflate the numbers for some of those on that list – e.g. the British Virgin Islands has a population of ~30k people and Saint Kitts ~47k, so both some degree of rounding and a large degree of Poissonian-like fluctuation are probably to be expected...
I see this cited very often, but what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison?
I think most people agree that low-level drug offenders shouldn't be filling our prisons.
But most people who live/work/frequent urban areas will have a steady stream of anecdotes about someone being mugged or otherwise experiencing violence, serious property crime, open drug, etc.
How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?
I've lived in an urban area for the last ~25 years and I certainly don't have a "steady stream" of anecdotes of the type of crime you're describing.
On the other hand, there is a steady stream of news articles about street crime, which often seems to portray the situation as worse than it is.
People that comment under news headlines on Twitter, for example, sometimes seem completely detached from reality, thinking they'll be murdered in a Mad Max hellscape if they cross some imagined urban boundary (but many of these people have an ideological agenda, so it's not clear whether they actually believe this).
Of course, there are issues in the city, just like there is everywhere, including distracted drivers (my worst fear), domestic abuse, and so on. Street crime certainly does exist, and is worse in some areas for sure, but is it really the biggest threat to our everyday safety?
It's kind of like how my mom gets caught up worrying about gangs, and I always ask her if she's ever had an interaction with a gang member (the answer is always no). Sure, gangs exist and sometimes do bad things to uninvolved people, but if you compare, for example, domestic abuse or negligent car crashes, those are far more of a threat to most of us commenting here than gangs ever will be.
EDIT: And to the extent that the U.S. does have more crime/incarceration than other countries, I'd ask what we're doing wrong, or more neutrally, what's different about our approach? One major issue is that our prison system seems particularly ineffective at rehabilitation and reintegrating people into society, so recidivism is high.
> And to the extent that the U.S. does have more crime/incarceration than other countries, I'd ask what we're doing wrong, or more neutrally, what's different about our approach?
Why are you only considering our approach and not the differences in our citizens? Approaches don’t commit crimes, people do. What makes our _citizens_ different?
> what exactly should we take away from this? Just some general idea that "too many" people are in prison?
Yes. Same as when we compare what proportion of GDP we spend on health care and compare it to other countries with longer lifespans. We're supposed to take away the general idea that we are spending too much on too little healthcare. When we look at how much murder we have per capita and compare it to our number of prisoners per capita, we should take away the fact that we're getting too little murder reduction for too much imprisoning of people.
> How can we reconcile the fact that we still encounter too many dangerous, antisocial people with the fact that we have high incarceration rates?
We don't bother. If one's attempted solution of incarcerating poor people makes violence worse, the answer is obviously to incarcerate even more people.
The rest of the world used to be behind by at least a factor of 2. Bad as it is, things are actually much better than in 2010, where just over 1% (1,000 per 100,000) of the total population (1.3% of adults) were in prison.
This number is likely to continue to decrease, as sentences have gotten shorter over time, and those have a huge, huge lag time. Your average prosecutor has, for better or worse, liberalized significantly from 1980 to now, even when compared to the general public.
I was surprised to see BVI & Saint Kitts on that list, although it seems like the figures are right, just a bit odd, with the way the rates are given as number of prisoners per 100k people.
BVI - Prison population ~140-150, total population ~30k
SK&N - Prison population ~200, total population ~50k
If you put millions of people (higher percentage than countries in Europe e.G) into prison there are less people unemployed. That doesn't say something about your economy though, for which, beside GDP, the unemployement rate very often is a proxy.
The biggest other reason:
Unemployement rate in Europe is mostly calculated by the number of people getting benefits and looking for a job (roughly) (+ in Germany if they work less than 15h/week). The US calls a sample of housholds (some 10k) and asks if the people in the household actively look for jobs but don't have one. In that case they are counted as jobless.
Russia doesn't publish its incarceration stats, apparently.
Also, would the millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in China be considered "incarcerated" or is this simply a definition left to non-autocratic democracies?
The Wagner PMC is recruiting cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine in Russian prisons. The Russian incarceration numbers may be improving drastically as we speak!
One would think think detaining a million Uyghurs would equate to incarceration. I certainly do think so.
But on the other hand, if you need to compare yourself to countries such as China and Russia and have your defense be "well at least we don't have concentration camps", you know you have work to do. Maybe the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate, be it per capita or absolute, but it does have the highest rate of incarceration of any modern 'free' society. And that is a shame.
Even accepting grossly inflated propaganda figures, ~2M were detained over multiple years, with the vast majority on short sentences (months). We're talking stat shifts of low 100,000s locked up for months spread over 5 years. It wouldn't have shifted PRC per capita internment figures to be comparable with the US.
Or that by all accounts mass internment phase is over, majority have been released, extra problematic elements that couldn't be fixed in a few months/years are removed from society with lifetime sentences. The TLDR is "mass internment" is a temporary tool in PRC for deradicalization initiatives with deadlines in mind, not permanent conditions supported by prison industrial complexes like in the US. XJ securitization was expensive, not profitable.
> Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs, Kazaks, and other Turkic minority groups in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang have been swept up in what is probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.
Adding the right minority groups will give you however high number you need, but even he admits it’s not just Uighurs. And the result is still better than US incarceration ratios.
(Or course this about largest incarceration is bullshit too, but hey, he needs to be making money somehow, right?)
There are only twelve million Uighurs on the planet, and the US murdered six million random Muslims as a response to a 9/11 planned and committed by Saudi nationals.
Also, there aren't millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in China. There were an enormous number of Uighurs rounded up, usually for dubious reasons, in a a ruthless Sinoization campaign meant to stop efforts (with terrorism and bombings) to create a breakaway republic. Notably, China nearly cloned the US's anti-Muslim anti-terrorism language in order to justify this dragnet. Since then, virtually everyone has been released and the program wound down. US nationalists will still be talking about it 50 years from now as an excuse for why we need to hurt Chinese people, as if the Uighur crackdown had the staying power of our indefinite prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Excuse me? Calling out a dictatorship that's committing genocide has exactly nothing to do with American nationalism nor with "hurting" people of some ethnicity.
I'm also Jewish. Your statement is equivalent to saying Jews still talk about the Holocaust 50 years after it happened as a way to hurt German people. Or that Blacks talk about slavery as a way to hurt white people. These were groups that were victims of racial genocide and you're using the oldest cheap trick of holocaust revisionists to blame them for making some other racial group feel guilty...?
It was the communist party, the nazi party, the institution of slavery. Not the Chinese, the Germans, the whites. We call the truth out to try to prevent it from happening again. Racist propagandists and the peddlers of denial, who are also the ones to commit genocide, come up with the shallow excuse that the victims are racist.
Pretending that people talk about CCP concentration camps to "hurt Chinese people" is an explicit propaganda attempt to cover up or change the subject from an actual racial genocide committed by the Chinese government, by using an imaginary, nonexistent racist response from the west that makes "Chinese people" into the narrative's victims. Keep polishing that, one day it might sound as good as Putin's version about victimized Russians.
You can think of housing for the homeless as prison for the homeless.. without the additional costs of guards, high walls, profits to private prison owners and kickbacks to politicians.
Also a better chance of better outcomes for many, raising taxes from those that pay taxes (over and above those who are homeless but also have jobs and pay taxes .. (yes, they're a thing)).
I cannot shake the feeling that the bulk of those social benefits could be captured by offering a very compact "cage-home" like storage closet, that can be locked and allows sleeping and storing one's valuables, with access to bathroom and a minimal food preparation areas.
Nobody should be forced to sleep rough, in the cold and dirt, where they are vulnerable to rapes, theft and beatings, such a life turns the kindest soul into an animal. 20 sq. feet of lockable closet with a mattress and shelves to store one's minimal belongings could mean maintaining their humanity and preventing turning them into dangerous criminals.
This would be so cheap to offer that it could be a basic human right, I would certainly pay taxes for it before other stupidities promoted as measures against crime. It's definitely not an incentive to be poor, those who can afford can rent a larger space, it would be a minimal guaranteed, free baseline: no matter how bad you fail in life, you will still get to be treated like a human being.
> The city owns thousands of vacant lots, many of which have been abandoned for decades, that could provide sites for tiny house villages or other innovative housing concepts that can have an immediate impact.
Sad and deliberate. We have more than enough to expansively build houses for everyone, but we don't simply to make a few richer.
> Cage hotels emerged in Minneapolis in the late 19th century, as a way to house the migrant laborers who came to the city to find work and then to stay while they spent their earnings from the railroads, the farms and the logging camps. By 1895, there were 50 cage hotels in Minneapolis. While these hotels provided a cheap place to stay, the rest of Minneapolis found them increasingly distasteful. The city outlawed new cage hotels in 1918, but they were such an established institution that some of them lasted for four more decades.
The flophouse WP entry points out: "gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit"
However, that skips over how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago.
> how (non-poor) people "found them increasingly distasteful", even a hundred years ago
That's easy to explain: exclusionary zoning, maximum density requirements, aesthetic rules etc are all forms of selection based on social status. Class and racial lines are strong and people strongly want to keep the "character" of their area, i.e to live near people of comparable social status.
It’s so weird to me that this is a near-universal definition of “character” because every neighborhood I’ve ever been in that’s segregated by class has been absolutely miserable and boring.
exactly. I'd be willing to contribute to humane encouragement into such a scheme. I would no doubt also include free health care and a robust detox and addiction and psyche programs.
i believe that, ironically, the less progressive jurisdictions already provide this service while the more "progressive" districts have not yet made it mandatory.
We have an excess of seacans (ocean shipping containers) in America. Slip a molded, insulated, stainless steel shell into it, designed for wash-out. Provide community kitchen/toilet facilities, and community storage facilities. Make it easy to move to a different cluster of seacan shelter, so that people can find their community. Provide a lot of social services to these communities, help people get over their addictions and traumas.
Speaking of trauma, we’ve had quite a few global-scale mass human death events this past few generations. Every family has experienced a hugely traumatizing society-destroying event within the past four generations. World wars. Genocides. Civil war. Social revolutions.
These are experiences that fundamentally wreck a lot of people. They come back or live through it, and end up broken. Maybe they withdraw, maybe they get angry or violent, maybe they let their kids run wild, maybe they are too restrictive — in the end the family suffers trauma and society suffers from their trauma.
Little wonder, then, that we have addiction and behavioural problems up the wazoo.
If you look at actual programs to house homeless people in practice, prison is a bargain. In Portland a charitable estimate to house 1/3 of the homeless is 320k/unit to build + 20k/year/unit to maintain.
The cost of living is, indeed, incredibly high. It's no wonder there are so many homeless.
What would our society look like if we didn't allow the greed of property owners to displace people from the opportunity to sleep indoors?
No matter what, there is a cost to homelessness. Most people expect that cost to be paid by the homeless themselves; after all, that's the status quo.
Those who can't afford a home, by definition, can't pay for homelessness. That's literally the problem. The only possible solution is someone else paying. Anything else is just ignorance.
The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.
Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care, including addiction care. There are a lot of options for people before they end up on the street (including moving to lower cost of living areas, which is what most people do rather than become homeless), and there are a lot of supportive options for people where the primary barrier is income, rather than inability to manage one’s own affairs.
The status quo is that blue cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year encouraging homelessness while blocking the development of new housing, while people who have their shit together need to deal with random violence, open drug abuse, lack of access to parks and sidewalks, and all of the other problems that come with running an open-air asylum for years without respite.
This morning on my way to work I had to walk in the middle of the road (sidewalk was covered by tents - the city is being sued because it is a real ADA issue), try to avoid second-hand smoke of what appeared to be meth but maybe was fentanyl, and step over human feces, all while watching out for needles. The sidewalks are soaked with urine which unfortunately isn’t washed away in the relatively dry summers. I have to keep my head on a swivel because people randomly test you; last week I saw someone being chased by a crazed person through downtown, a week before that someone tried but failed to suckerpunch a passer by, and earlier this summer we had a cherished member of the community randomly killed while waiting for the bus (https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/07/murder-charge-now-f...). There are several similar stories this year. I’ve lived in Portland coming on two years, and even as a tall man, I have been chased, followed, lunged at, called expletives, witnessed several crimes, and had a mentally I’ll person try to run me down with their car, running until I eventually found a police officer to intervene.
> The quoted costs are much higher than the cost of market rate rent. There is a reason for that.
> Homelessness, at least the kind that is highly visible, has relatively little to do with the cost of housing, and a lot to do with lack of mental health care...
Hence the increased cost of housing such a person.
Is there waste in these programs from greed and politics? Definitely. Would a perfect implementation that completely avoids that greed match the market rate? I doubt it.
When you buy or rent a home, you generally must provide evidence that you are a stable reliable person; both to illustrate your ability to make regular payments, and to prove you won't become a nuisance to your neighbors, which would ultimately introduce its own cost.
Mental health is core to the issue of homelessness. Not having a stable home is core to the issue of mental health. Do you see the race condition? This is the part of the algorithm that requires intervention.
We can and should do more to help with mental health, especially in the US. Housing is an integral part of that. It's going to cost a lot. We should definitely do whatever we can to mitigate the greed that inflates that cost, but cost itself isn't enough of Ann excuse to give up on humanity.
If you treat the homeless as lepers and stick them at the edge of town - you will get exactly what you said. If however, you create one home for the homeless on every street/block/floor - you'll find out that they are people, just like you and me, and with a little bit of support many of them will even thrive. The US is just so big on NIMBY that there is zero chance of that happening :-(
Distribute them across cities in mixed income neighbourhoods rather than the US model of post red lining NIMBY isolationism.
Homeless people have a wide demographic, a large number have had employment and professions and seek the stability to re-engage with the workforce.
The notion that all homeless are on a one way spiral into a slum and should be keep out of sight and out of mind is a great part of the underlying issues.
I doubt it, but would be happy to see the data proving the opposite.
Just for comparison, in top-of-the-shelf socialist Sweden there are 30k homeless people per 10 million population. It matches pretty well to 500k of homeless people in the USA.
Something like X units per new development are "reserved" for people under certain income limits. It distributes income ranges across geographic regions, rather than concentrating them by unit rental prices.
Here's one example from my neighborhood:
"On Sept. 19, contractors with the Anderson Companies were issued an $8 million construction permit for the foundation and footings of what will be a two-year building project at 411 Lexington Parkway — the 304-unit Lexington Station apartment building, half of which will be designated affordable housing."
Slums are a result of factors such as emargination, lack of services, crime and poverty. All factors that are lacking in wealthy hoods. Police actually cares about safety and order when wealthy citizens are at stake.
I don't see how being poor forces people to throw garbage in the streets and pee in the streets.
One thing I can tell after living outside of the USA for some time, is that a couple of unemployed drug addicts can turn an otherwise neat and tidy house into a shithole. And that was a country with a free medical care. Including addiction treatment.
In San Francisco, where I live, all of the “services” (i.e., food banks, check cashing services, shelters, soup kitchens, even the DMV) are in the poor neighborhoods (the Mission). You can’t find any of those services in rich neighborhoods (Noe/Cole Valley).
So, maybe we should keep building affordable housing in poor neighborhoods instead?
I'm talking about having access to good schools, good law enforcement, clean environment, etc. You know, the same quality services people like you receive, as the poor are nothing else but people like you.
Where shall you house these homeless people? During the pandemic NYC tried using vacant hotels to house homeless people. Surprise surprise the areas immediately surrounding the hotels turned into a drug and needle playground, and people evacuated. It was an epic disaster.
People with this idea are almost always from the suburbs. Plenty of homeless people are merely down on their luck, but many (most?) others have mental issues or have crippling drug addiction. No one wants that shit near their home or children.
You can certainly try and force it, but you can’t force people to tolerate it. People will just leave, and the nearby areas will turn into a slum.
This problem is described, wrongly, as homelessness, by both advocates for ending open drug scenes, and by activists who view themselves as working on behalf of the unhoused.
That's not the effect of their activism. The effect of their advocacy is to increase misery. Open drug scenes make the city unsafe. Open drug scenes draw the temporarily homeless into a shadow market of addictions and prostitution.
Open drug scenes are bad for everyone who has to be near them, but they are particularly destructive to the mentally ill addicts who constitute them.
I'm sure private prisons would love to turn all of us into literal slaves, but if we reduced the number of them down to the correct 0%, urban residents would still be demanding the end of open drug scenes.
They are right to do so. Supporting open drug scenes is supporting misery, harm, assault, theft, overdose, rape.
Don't support open drug scenes. Make sure your donations to help the unhoused don't support open drug scenes (this is difficult).
Also, let's end private prisons. It was never a good idea and it won't get better with time.
Reminds me of needle exchanges, and the harm they brought to neighborhoods that opened them out of the 'goodness' of their hearts, only to end up turning their neighborhood into the newest drug slum.
Or at least that's been my experience so far in any city I have lived in that has one near my current location. One place I even moved to and from again twice, and got to see the before and after through the decade essentially. It's like night and day. Absolutely no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise that these programs are a good idea, especially when the best idea is to just remove these people from urban centers by tossing them into rehab out in the country side where they can't get these drugs easily.
I've seen that work wonders by comparison; and it doesn't ruin neighborhoods which gives NIMBY's a legitimate excuse to do things like round up the homeless and put them in jails. Which I do not agree with, but understand their grief. The very act is a breach of their natural rights as a human being, and let's not get me started on my opinions about how housing should be a natural human right irrevocable by anyone or anything.
The yellow brick road is paved not by the demons among us, but those who think themselves angels.
Edit: I'm going to sleep now folks, so if I don't respond to anyone after this point of 7:15am CST-6, that's why. You all have a nice day, and/or a nice night.
> [1] NIDA-funded research has found that syringe services programs do not increase drug use. In fact, program participants in these studies were significantly more likely to enter substance use treatment and reduce or stop drug use.
As an aside, this is the second time on this site in a couple days I've seen someone post something along the lines of "Absolutely no one will be able to convince me otherwise no matter what."
So why are you posting here at all? You've already proudly announced that your opinions are impervious to any new information. That is the exact opposite purpose of this site.
Well, I said in my edit and some other comments I was going to sleep, but I decided to check here again for some reason... and here we are.
So I guess I will point out that (I am pretty sure) I never said it increased drug use. I said that it turned the neighborhoods that held these places into drug slums because of the increase in drug users that were now in those areas because of the needle exchange. To be fair to you though, that was elaborated on more so in another comment to another person.
And it is on that bit that I will not budge, because that is personal experience I have witnessed and secondary experience I have been told about by people I trust to not just make things up. It may not be the 'data' you want to see or hear, but it should matter just as much since what we see on a day to day is what influences us as a society.
So I think it's great that some of them are taking the chance provided to them to get clean. I love that. But again, I never said it increased drug use. I said it increased the number of drug users in the area. This is a glaringly different statement.
Now, I am actually off to bed now, and my computer is being turned off. You have a nice day/night. Thank you for the information.
Not trying to pile on you individually but this is an interesting line of thought in general, so continuing the thread here...
Let's say there are 10 nearby cities with drug addicts. Let's say 3 of them start running needle exchanges or other "drug friendly" policies.
By this logic, if those policies don't increase drug use, but do attract users, then maybe we just made 7 cities drug-free, and 3 cities into concentrated zones where social programs as well as law enforcement can be more targeted and more effective? If so, then very likely this will be a net-positive for the 10 cities as a whole, with neutral to slightly-worse outcomes for the target neighborhoods in the 3 cities running the programs.
Many programs/policies are not operated from a macro-enough perspective, or not optimizing for macro-level outcomes, or humans just aren't capable of macro-enough greater-good decision-making. If the 10-20 homeowners living directly next to the proposed needle exchange site can veto it, that might be better for them individually, but worse as a whole for the city/state/nation/world. See exhibit: NYC and proposals for new shelter sites.
On the other hand, seems like these sorts of debates always just end up becoming examples to prove out Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried" claim.
Your comment reminds me of a topic from "What We Owe The Future"[0][1], in particular an idea in ethics that is aptly called the repugnant conclusion[2].
This is not a perfect parallel but both the RC and your comment touch on the idea of how or when it is justified to make X people's life worse to make Y people's life better.
I would strongly recommend not to take an axiomatic approach to this topic.
> How is it fair to those people living in those 3 other cities? Why should they have to put up with it?
Why do I have to pay taxes for schools when I don't have any children?
If everyone thought like this, then we would all be worse off. Yeah, it sucks for you.
Another thought experiment: You are the head of a hospital and can determine how funding gets spent. There is a five year old with a disease that can be cured if you spend all of your budget to do it. This would effectively shut down the hospital for everyone else, but the kid would live. Is it ethical to spend the money on the kid?
> Why do I have to pay taxes for schools when I don't have any children?
This is not a comparable scenario. Presuming you wish to live in a given locale for the remainder of your years, having a civilized, educated, and literate workforce available to you is surely preferred to not having one.
> Another thought experiment:
This is a waste of time thought experiment. Healthcare professionals triage all the time. Society prioritizes various goals all the time. The US could be spending the entire military budget to develop healthcare treatments, but it does not, for myriad reasons. In real life, the 5 year old has died in the past due to lack of sufficient resources, and will continue to die. It does not matter if it is ethical or unethical, politically, it will be unpopular to sacrifice a whole community’s access to healthcare so one 5 year old can live.
In any case, bringing up unrelated examples does not advance discussions.
> Why do I have to pay taxes for schools when I don't have any children?
This is directly related because it is often brought up by people who argue similar things and used in the same way to say 'it doesn't affect me, so why should I pay the consequences'. Paying a tax that doesn't directly help you, and having to move or live in a neighborhood which has changed for the worse are directly comparable. You say "Presuming you wish to live in a given locale for the remainder of your years, having a civilized, educated, and literate workforce available to you is surely preferred to not having one", yet this is the very thing I am getting at. The person arguing 'why should they have to deal with it' is not taking in to account that everyone would have a worse quality of life because diseases like AIDS don't stop at junkies. Not having clean needles affects more than junkies.
> This is a waste of time thought experiment.
Really? You don't get how thinking about 'letting an innocent kid die so that many people can get helped' has anything to do with this? I really thought that one was self-evident.
Yep, I still wouldn't change my moral position from the other day you're complaining about. Posting my beliefs here doesn't mean I'm looking for someone to convince me to change my mind. I'm stating my beliefs!
To be frank, if you're shouting "Hey everyone, I'm so sure of my beliefs that nothing is going to change my mind", good for you, but nobody cares. There are plenty of other places where you can broadcast your obliviousness to new information. HN is not one of them, given that "curiosity" is highlighted as a prime motivator for this site.
It was a discussion about culture and tradition. My statement was that I believe it's morally wrong to circumcise boys. 0 shouting. He's called me oblivious, and apparently I shouldn't have the right to comment if I'm not willing to change that belief.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I just told the other fellow I'm logging off for the night, but I would hate to seem rude and as if I am ignoring your apt comment.
Yes, CS Lewis has a lot of good quotes. I don't remember them all by heart or anything, but I do find myself somehow paraphrasing things that he and others have said before in more eloquent words.
What a weird way to use this quote. Tyranny is when someone does something oppressive. Offering a free service that no one needs to use doesn’t fit the criteria.
I do not really want to comment on whether it is an appropriate use, but obviously the tormented peasants in the comment are implied to be the residents in the area.
Sorry Genghis, but I don't believe I need to answer these questions about where I lived, as they are personal information. I will however tell you they were all Canadian cities, and they were all between the years 2008 and now. The one that was twice was one of the prairie provinces cities.
It's been the opposite experience for me, but where I lived doctors just give the addicts drugs that are similar to their drugs of choice. Man has to eat, addicts has to use. When you ruin the market economy around drugs by making them essentially free the criminal aspects seem to disappear.
Up here, doctors are notoriously difficult to get any kind of opiate from now unless you REALLY need it. Which in turn I would say has led to people relying on the grey market more and more, which has in turn led to our fentanyl crisis.
So I don't entirely disagree with you here, but I still don't want government being able to tax these things. We need a better solution.
The government doesn't tax them here. They're free, because the cost of the drugs is less than the cost of the crime prevented by just giving them out.
"When you ruin the market economy around drugs by making them essentially free the criminal aspects seem to disappear."
California has legalized marijuana for many years and there's still a strong cartel presence in marijuana trafficking. Cartels still find a way to profit from marijuana, other drugs, and immigration.
I find the notion that making fentanyl available at no cost being good for society by removing cartel involvement to be completely nonsensical. The end result is still the same. You still have a substance on the street that is fatal in incredibly small doses, and being used as fillers in party- and counterfeit drugs.
Legalizing fentanyl isn't going to alter that dynamic nor change the drug's lethality.
So no, the criminal aspects just don't disappear. They merely adapt.
Legalized with high taxes and inconvenient supply. If people already have a tax-free source, then they will continue to use that, especially if the business hours and location are more convenient.
And it's worth pointing out that cannabis culture and opiate culture are not one and the same: cannabis is far less addictive and far more commonly used, even in areas where it is still criminalized.
It also costs significantly less - on the order of beer money or fast food - to afford a cannabis supply, than it costs to afford an illegal opiate supply. On top of that, you can often get the cost of prescriptions (alternative to illegal opiates) significantly lowered, especially outside the US.
So switching your cannabis supply from illegal to legal costs you more, but switching your opiate supply to a legal prescription can save you money. It's a totally different dynamic.
If opiate users have a reliable and affordable source, then they will not be motivated to commit crime to fund their addictions. If they are getting their drugs from a pharmaceutical source, with regular visits to a prescribing physician, then they can significantly lower the risk of overdose.
So yes, criminal aspects will be affected. So will mortality.
Legal state level, illegal federal and global means that there is a high incentive for diversion to both other states and other countries. There's a difference between going to a medical facility every day to get a 1-3 day supply and a free-for-all with drugs being handed out for $5 on every corner.
> needle exchanges... end up turning their neighborhood into the newest drug slum.
How do you suppose that happened? Do you think there was a severely addicted population that could not get their fix due to concerns of transmittable diseases? So were forced to quit cold turkey, at the height of their despair, for lack of sanitary injection paraphernalia? You surely realize how absurd that sounds, right?
Since you seem to be a well reasoned and articulate person, I'm genuinely curious how could a needle exchange program cause neighborhoods to turn into "drug slums"? Perhaps you are seeing a correlation with drug use that does not reveal any causality? Perhaps needle exchange programs induce normalization of drug use in a certain area, making addicts fell less rejected and thus attracting them there? But surely such a visible concentration of addicts in a certain area is just a symptom a much larger invisible problem and condemning those those affected to AIDS or Hep-C does nothing to solve the root cause?
Well, I have no way to prove my experience through data, since it's not being taken by any reputable sources I know of, sadly...
But what I can say at least is that I would suspect that the 'drug slum' aspect occurs because the drug users flock towards those needle exchanges and congregate near them for convenience sake. I say that, because that's what seemed to be the case when I lived in those areas. People I never saw in those neighborhoods before, suddenly practically lived there. So I suspect that is the case.
Anyways, it's getting late and my patience is starting to wear thin, so I should probably go now before nicer folk like you start to think of me as less well reasoned and less articulate a person.
I'm sure that you blame ghettos on the people that live in them rather than the systems developed to have intentional concentrative effects. It's funny how intelligent people stop thinking the moment their emotions kick in.
Isn't what gp is doing the opposite, and is in fact blaming the system developed (needle stations) for abnormally concentrating drug users on an area?
I don't know why such an admittedly anecdotal observation has generated such response... Its not that hard to at least entertain the idea that clean drug-equipment stations might have side effects and impacts to the surrounding community that haven't been properly studied yet, etc.
Actually, I think it's a problem that can be blamed on the entirety of society. But thanks for your kind comment. And yes, I agree with you about emotions and intelligence. Quite the phenomenon.
Not sure where you are located but one thing I’ve found is that people from the Bay Area are much more concerned about drugs amongst the homeless than in other locations. And rightly! It’s shocking as a visitor to encounter San Francisco’s version of homelessness.
As a Chicagoan though I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing. We’ve eliminated almost all of the short term housing that helps people move off the streets with the obvious side effect of homeless encampments. But you very rarely hear any talk of easing the restrictions on short term housing.
Any attempt to establish a short term housing prompts multiple questions. For example, do you allow drunk people in? If you don't, you leave a lot of people on the shore. If you do, you end up with drunk fights and vomit on the stairs.
There is an SRO less than a block from my house (one of very few left in the city). They have strict rules around intoxication outside of your room. It does have the impact of meaning people who can't control their abuse have to find other housing. We should have a place for those folks too, but I'd rather there be a place that doesn't solve all of the housing issues, but can get some people off the streets rather than wait for a solution that solves every issue.
As an aside, they are perfectly good neighbors. As is the studio apartment complex next to it, that is a single tier above the SRO. I have a lot more trouble from the fast food wing place on the other side of the block than I've ever had from my neighbors.
Maybe it should be on categories: you get drunk, you move where the vomit and drunk violence is. You want to commit to stop drinkig you get out of there. But it’s more wishful thinking as nobody sane wants to monitor these. All solutions that are given seem to be half assed and barely work.
The perfect is the enemy of the good in lots of these cases, the old flophouses would have drunk tanks where they knew to throw the appropriate people, and hoseable floors.
But you can't build things like that anymore; you get shut down if you're not meeting all the "minimum requirements" and so the people who at least used to have a heated room out of the weather are now living rough.
> I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing
You should be more concerned about general restrictions on housing construction. Mental health is not magically better in Japan and yet we don't see this kind of vagrancy there. But they also don't have the kind of nimbyism that plagues American cities with "intractable" homelessness problems.
I grew up in the Bay Area. It's always been about mental health and housing from my perspective. Pushing symptoms like "drug use" out of public view has nothing to do with solving the causes like "economic precarity", "systematic discrimination", and "lack of affordable housing".
Drug problems are always symptoms of bigger problems. There's nothing wrong with drug use as long as it's properly regulated.
There are many harm reduction measures that are better than criminalization. If you don't want people using drugs on the sidewalk, give them a better place to do it. Countries like Denmark and Switzerland have had enormous success with government run heroin clinics. Supplying free, clean drugs in a safe environment reduces overdoses, prevents drug users from going into debt and almost completely eliminates drug related crime.
In general, the solution to problems like homelessness and drug addiction is to give people the support they need. Direct cash transfers are by far the most effective way of supporting people, but this is unpopular because the public doesn't trust the poor. People tend to think homeless people are irrational and will waste any money they are given on drugs, even though that's been proven false. The biggest challenge is combating prejudice and changing public opinion.
Saying "end" here acts like the current system ends the misery of the homeless people who are subjected to it. But the position they end up inside of a US prison is equally miserable. The only difference is that it is invisible to those in the outside world.
That's not the only difference, of course, given that the prisons get more money. Really, this is a call to privatize the misery. Still, it could be a net gain if it costs less than subsidizing emergency services and reclaims the streets.
The best way to solve the drug problem is legalizing all drugs (or at least decriminalizing them) so let's do that too.
There's high-quality precedent, and Portugal is the classic example. They decriminalized all drugs back in 2001 and went from one of the worst in the EU to one of the best in the EU along basically every major measure of drug harm. [1]
[edit] > The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.
This was achieved in conjunction with some rehab social programs. The article is worth a read.
The paper I linked to had several case studies, I think the Zurich and Portugal model both have a lot to teach the USA.
But step one is to stop pretending that open drugs scenes are caused by homelessness. They're caused by open-air markets for drugs, and the US in fact does a fairly good job of caring for the unhoused except for the open drug scene problem. End those, the rest of the unhoused have enough available solutions, and it's easier to do more when more is needed.
There's no ending them without a health care policy for addiction, either. Treating drug addiction as a criminal matter just leads back to open drug scenes. Keeping them gone requires a different approach.
What, if any, approaches or policies are you actually advocating for when you talk about "ending" open drug scenes?
DEA raids and incarceration of the homeless? Universal healthcare and ending scheduling of drugs? State/federal bans on overly-restrictive local zoning and international building codes, which prevent the construction of affordable new housing?
I've encountered OP before as a commenter. They use verbose diatribes to try to shuffle their own (quite radical) personal moral convictions past the HN crowd. For what reason, I do not know, but it is to me indistinguishable from a lack of real understanding. It reminds me of economists who grow up only reading Hayek, never having seen the inside of day-to-day business operations.
1. Crime rates reduced: I mean, of course they did. It was not longer a crime to be using those drugs, so there was no reason to be arresting people for possessing them. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty simple to me.
2. HIV rates reduced: I remember reading something once upon a time ago that made mention about how HIV rates plummeted all around the world (except in Africa) during that same time frame. Yet the rest of the world definitely hasn't decrimed/legalized all drugs. Might be worth looking into that more and see if maybe Portugal just had a happy coincidence.
3. Overdose deaths: Strangely enough with humans, once something is no longer illicit, they want it less. They are also less likely to overdose on said drugs because they aren't having to risk a bad batch from a bad dealer as much, that sort of thing. So this is a win for legalization, I must admit; but it's a pretty loose one, since the whole "can't have it, thus want it" effect is pretty strong with humanity. Not having it anymore cause they can have it could be part of this reduction. Needs more looking into. (I would hope that before downvoting, people would look into things like the reduction of marijuana use among some people because it was no longer against the law, thus 'cool' to be a user of marijuana here in Canada and I think some American states as well. This applies to basically any drug due to how human psychology operates.)
4. I think most of those reductions are going to have more to do with happy coincidences, and the conjunction of rehab use, since the use of said drugs isn't as socially stigmatized anymore, thus neither is rehab.
(Edit: Look, folks. I get it, some of you really don't like what I have to say here. That's fine. But please, give me a break. I'm a new person here, and I'm just trying to add context to the conversation. Thanks for understanding, hopefully.)
Fair enough I suppose. I don't agree that anyone has the right to downvote something just because they disagree with it; as I would hope they would instead provide a reason for that disagreement, but it's not my site, so not my rules.
But I still don't agree with the idea that they have the right just because they managed to get 500 karma on some webpage. That's technically easily done by just saying 'just the right thing' and getting all the updoots. At that point, it's really not worth much.
You're clearly arguing in good faith and very polite. Just ignore the downvoters, since this is a sensitive subject. Later on people will come back and see your greyed out comment and upvote it just to offset the people overreacting
As my father used to say "Just because you've got the right, doesn't make it right".
500 karma means a user can downvote: that's ability. No one can punish a user for downvoting either: if someone can do something, and no one can stop them from doing it or punish them after, that means they've got the right.
1, 3, and 4: you're making very good points in favor of legalization, but your tone seems to indicate it's reluctant, as if those don't count somehow. If I got it right, could you expand on why they don't count? On the face of it, of course all of the following are great upsides of legalization:
1. less arrests
3. one less incentive to seek drugs
4. more willingness to seek rehab when needed.
Well, at risk of being banned for saying things people don't like... lol...
To answer your question, the reluctance is because I would rather we just take the criminal element out of it all by just decriminalizing it. I would much rather we not give governments any sort of incentive to introduce more 'sin taxes' essentially.
Decriminalization gives us all those benefits you bring up, without enabling our governments to be worse than they already are. I have already witnessed this on a lower level because of marijuana legalization in Canada. Hence why I bring it up at all. Paul Martin was going to decriminalize it, but it got squashed, and the more popular opinion that I am aware of is that the other powers that be didn't like they wouldn't be able to profit off of it as easily. Not like how they can now, with enacting arbitrary rules like "can only grow 4 plants per household" etc, etc.
If your argument is about legalization vs. decriminalization, then you should say so. You've been all over the comments arguing, but this is the first time I've seen you mention it.
In a group conversation, you can count on people remembering what you were talking about, but the structure of comments isn't like that. We can only expect people to know what's written in the parent comments of the tree. Remembering that can help us talk to each other instead of past each other.
With all due respect, I would think that with the amount of times I have differentiated the terminology of legalization and decriminalization, that it should have been obvious at this point.
I guess not. Anyways, thanks for the input. I'll keep it in mind to be more precise on what I am saying.
P.S If you look carefully, you'll see that I was merely replying mostly to people who replied to me. At least after the first few comments to others. Not sure why you needed to portray it as "arguing with people all over the place", but I wanted to make that precisely clear.
Maybe you did somewhere else in the thread, but not here. That's entirely my point.
Look at all the parent comments from this one, and you will see what you have and haven't said.
Picture this: you are at a party, and told someone something on one side of the room, and expected the rest of us to have heard it. It just doesn't work that way.
Edit: I'm not entirely sure anymore, but I think my comment was made before the edit was made by arcticbull. Just saying so that if anyone wonders why it looks like I am disagreeing with someone who is making part of my own argument (now) ... that's why. I only remember there being legalization brought up.
-------Original Comment Below------
Sorry, but I cannot agree. Legalization just gives government reason to profit off the harm of the individual.
If you really want to remove the crime from drug use, go with decriminalization only. Just make it not a crime, that's all. I know this seems like its the same thing called a different thing to some, but after marijuana legalization and how that went in Canada, I think you all should really take note of why "legalization" is just a ploy by governments to get more tax dollars.
I have no issue with people doing what they want with their own body freely of their own choice; but I have much issue with giving government any form of power and/or profit over that choice.
So you won't be budging me on this.
Besides, there's really only like 3 or 4 drugs that deserve to be removed from criminality; the rest are so damn harmful to a person that if they are taking those drugs... they're already pretty much at the bottom of the pit of hell they dug for themselves. There won't be any helping them unless you are willing to ignore their rights as a human being and force them into some sort of rehab system that is removed from urban centers entirely; so they can't get easy access to those drugs anymore.
Might even have to swallow the bill as tax payers to have them housed for a few years as well afterwards, still outside of urban centers, so they can pick their life back up and stand on their own two feet again.
But that's just my opinion on the matter. It's a real shame none of you will actually listen to it.
What if we just had legalization without taxation?
Also if you think people get clean in the country side that would suggest to me you’ve never spent time outside of these urban areas whence you’re trying to banish addicts. Anecdotally, the loneliness of the country side, being away from loved ones and familiar social and cultural institutions, made my own struggles worse.
> What if we just had legalization without taxation?
I'm pretty sure that's what we generally refer to as decriminalization. (lol)
> Also if you think people get clean in the country side that would suggest to me you’ve never spent time outside of these urban areas... (rest of comment redacted)
Alright, so... yes I have actually. And we had one of the rehab centers near our town, and while there was still some heavy drug use by some people in said town, it was never anything close to similar as what would be found in more urban centers. Furthermore, those people had to go to the city to get those drugs, which was my entire point. If you can't even get the drugs, cause you can't even get to the city, then you have to somehow get friendly with those people that everyone knows you shouldn't be hanging out with.
My condolences for your struggles friend, but just because you struggled with a situation that many others find to be a center of peace and comfort for themselves doesn't mean that I am wrong. It just means that my approach wouldn't work for you, possibly. Sad as it may seem, sometimes loved ones are the problem. They can be quite enabling, when they should be disabling. And it's those familiar social and cultural circles you bring up that are also sometimes part of why the harm exists to begin with. For some at least.
So perhaps my solution doesn't work 100% for everyone, but you are not the rule here either. You are an exception to it, in my books.
Finally, the country side is only lonely if you are the type to never interact with other country bumpkins. If that's you, then I am sorry, but that's more of a you problem... Try hanging out with some random people once in a while? Go to a bar and shoot some pool and meet some folk? I dunno, but staying at home itself only will definitely drive anyone nuts. I only suggest it for the severely addicted at all, because they can't really help themselves in regard to not falling back into old bad habits.
But again, there are no 100% fix all solutions. There will always be caveats, like yourself.
> legalization without taxation is decriminalization
No, the latter refers to simply not charging people. You can still confiscate their drugs and subject them to assessments a la Portugal. Decimalization is kind of a dumb, dangerous (ie no constitutionally established recourse) messy term, so think of the other one like food sales: legalization without taxation.
> one must go to the city to source drugs
Cottagecore as a policy idea
> go to a bar to avoid falling back into your addictive habits
I never said what I struggled with. What if it was the world’s deadliest drug: alcohol?
>> > go to a bar to avoid falling back into your addictive habits
> I never said what I struggled with. What if it was the world’s deadliest drug: alcohol?
-------------
I realize what you are trying to make a point of here, but note how I never said to drink while there. I said play some pool. Obviously it would be nice to have a drink, but legally they have to serve you water if you ask for it. Etc and so forth.
-------------
>> > one must go to the city to source drugs
> Cottagecore as a policy idea
Ironically, if I understand your terminology correctly; that's precisely what first nations do up here with their healing lodges where they send people instead of going to jail, etc.
>> > legalization without taxation is decriminalization
> No, the latter refers to simply not charging people. You can still confiscate their drugs and subject them to assessments a la Portugal. Decimalization is kind of a dumb, dangerous (ie no constitutionally established recourse) messy term, so think of the other one like food sales: legalization without taxation.
SO in other words, it makes it 'not a crime anymore'. I'm fine with them confiscating many of the drugs out there, because a good large chunk of them are all things no one needs to be taking anyways. Literally, no one.
And besides, I already stated multiple times now why I don't like legalization. It's just like you state yourself, it's more like food sales; which governments also tax. (Unless it's real food, in which case it might depend on where you live. Heavily processed/packaged foods get taxed here in Canada, while 'real food' does not.) I am not in favor of allowing government to tax people for doing things that harm themselves and potentially others.
But you did acknowledge that the environment wherein addiction sprouts makes it easier for it to rebound, rhetorical courtesy of my enabling loved ones. The countryside bar still demands a steady supply of the same, easily exhausted resource that fighting vice under city pressures does: will power. Yet per your prescription, it would be under the duress of exile.
> healing lodges
The example you give seems to be a conflation of social rehabilitation for people who have committed crimes against other people (as exemplified in the opening of that article, describing a woman who killed a child) and medical (mental specifically) rehabilitation as I thought we were discussing in the context of addiction. Art and animal therapies are hardly unique to first nations or indigenous cultures, though tribal jurisdiction certainly allows these groups more latitude in trying to address their community's problematic members. This is one of the benefits of Portugal's decriminalization process in that addicts' individual circumstances and paths to recovery are theoretically (though I can't vouch for the practice) given greater consideration.
> no taxing people for things that harm themselves and/or others
That's an interesting stance. Mitigating externalities is one of the ideas behind, for example, taxing pollution. Addressing second hand smoke, needle waste, etc could be good allocations of such tax dollars, but generally, at least in the US, sin taxes go into funds paying for bridges or school text books, which ironically makes the abstemious life one of civil selfishness.
I would say that the NL model of decrimilisation without legalisation doesn't work. Largely because of it NL has a big gang problem, and one of the highest murder rates in Europe. Now fully legalise drugs, give them out for free for all that I care, that's the only way to kill the organised crime around it.
I would also be interested in which drugs you believe are worth decriminalising and which ones you deem to dangerous. There are generally a lot of misconceptions about the health effects of (especially hard) drugs in particular compared to some legalised ones (alcohol has extremely strong health effects).
Cigarette consumption in the US has been steadily declining for the last 50 years or so. This is while state governments are taxing tobacco products heavily. In fact a 1 pct point increase in tobacco taxes are related to a 0.5 pct point decrease in tobacco consumption. [1]
So I don't buy the argument that the government will encourage harm because they make money off of it.
Okay, I'm going to reply to yours as well before calling it for the night. I keep trying to, but people keep on replying and I hate seeming to be rude by ignoring people. Especially when they seem to mean well. (But seriously, this is the last time, lol... I need to sleep.)
I accept the premise of your argument, since it makes sense on the simple side of things. But... I think you forget to include the fact that people just go to a new supplier if they find their smokes getting more and more expensive.
Up here in Canada (Can't speak on the states) people just buy smokes from the reserves instead. And since government and agencies that collect this sort of data are likely getting their numbers from legal sales, but not illegal ones or grey market at the very least; that means they are missing numbers that tell a different story.
Menthol cigs for example are technically not allowed here anymore; but people still manage to get them. From gangs, reserves, random people who managed to smuggle them across the border, etc.
Now, I keep saying I'm going to go to sleep here, but it's starting to feel like a run on joke now.
Sure, government might not always tax things that are harmful; but it also depends on who's running that government. And my experience thus far has been that they will tax harm, if they can get away with it. (I wish I could italicize that last part.)
Now, good night. Maybe... I keep trying to listen to tunes first, and maybe that's the mistake.
Moreover there are increasingly strict restrictions on where it is permissible to smoke. To mirror rhetoric elsewhere in the thread: in many areas the state and local government is successfully cracking down on "open nicotine scenes".
Drug use is rampant in rural areas too, so the "urban centers" thing doesn't come across that well.
If a person is addicted to drugs and needs to be removed from society "for their own good," this can be done without criminalization. Criminalization of drug usage seems entirely ineffective and even counterproductive.
I would say that we could go one step further. The government can issue drug tests. If someone demonstrates addiction through these tests, they get a tapering supply of their drug in pharmaceutical grade at zero cost.
Drug dealers can't compete with free, and the government's supply tapers to zero, so street supply and addiction should plummet.
You can prevent diversion of the government supply to the street by tagging it. Test positive on the government supply and you get nothing. Tighten or loosen policy as needed if street dealing returns.
I don't think it is a good idea to reduce the supply over time. It may make sense in some cases, but some addicts are better of by having a constant supply. Pharmaceutical grade opioids are pretty safe. Far safer than legal drugs like tobacco or alcohol.
This assumes people want to end their drug abuse. Even having the will, ending severe addiction with a tapering supply is extremely difficult, and painful. Like slowly peeling off a band-aid for months, or even years.
Odds are that proposed solution would help some people, but would fail in the majority of cases and cost an absolute fortune.
There's no way that some pills and vials and tracking will cost more than an entire drug war. If free is too expensive, just make it cheaper than the street.
And I don't think that the users have to want much. They are addicted, addiction is expensive, enter a free alternative that they will have to accept eventually when their drug dealers can't make ends meet and quit the game.
The taper comes after the drug dealers have all found something else to do. Give it some time for all their drug routes and contacts to go cold. And be prepared to ramp supply back up if they come back. It will be a multi-round game, but it's one that the drug dealers just can't win, for simple economic reasons.
This is a long documentary so I am sure there are better videos that get right to the point but this street is one of the more famous examples in America that you will hear brought up repeatedly in places like reddit.
it's defined in the paper but of course that's behind a paywall. Considering how many times the OP used the term, it would have been helpful for it to be defined.
I think he's thinking of East Hastings in Vancouver or Kensington in Philadelphia. YouTube will likely shock you if you're not familiar with this subculture.
I'm a bit confused what point your are trying to make. You don't ever define open drug scenes and the you link to an abstract for a paywalled article is similarly lacking. Based on some searching I found a paper that provides the following definition: "Open drug scenes are gatherings of drug users who publicly consume and deal drugs." But also acknowledges it is generally a fairly loosely defined term.
You repeatedly say "don't support open drug scenes" but never explain what you mean beyond a vague assertion that advocates for the unhoused support open drug scenes. You make absolutely no concrete comments on specific policy approaches, you just dismiss an entire group in a very general fashion.
Homelessness and open drug scenes are entwined, but different issues. Not all people at an open drug scene are unhoused. Many unhoused people are not drug addicts, though they tend to be less noticeable than the ones who are.
All of this seems to be a red herring since the article we are discussing brings up specific laws. Those are not laws focused in any way on addressing open drug scenes, but rather laws that target vagrancy in general. These laws are being pushed forward by groups funded by private prison owners.
Thus your assertion that this is somehow not true with a deflection onto "open drug scenes" is not convincing.
Don't bury the lede. "Open Drug Scenes" (never heard this phrase before) are merely a symptom of homelessness, a problem that has proven to be simple, if not easy, to solve.
You can have both, and they can create a feedback loop that guarantees someone will never be able to get out.
A more general example of this is scarcity mindset where the condition of not having enough of something causes someone to be poor at managing that resource [0].
There's an alternate conclusion (which seems a more sympathetic and obvious read to me) that people who would do drugs and have nowhere private they are allowed to be end up doing drugs in public.
I'm sure the cause/effect between homelessness and drug addiction is somewhat more complicated (and two-way; I'm confident that I'd be more likely to be an addict if I were homeless).
No, and this is such a weird and bad logical jump, and really shows the limitations of strict logical thinking and lack appreciated second-order type stuff.
Rich or middle class addicts still have houses to get high in.
In my moderately sized southern city of 200k, we logged/censused 576 homeless a few months ago. Of course these individuals were the ones able to be counted; there's likely more. So roughly a quarter of a percent per captia.
As with most US cities of this size and economic demographic we have a few areas where those without housing tend to congregate. Pains me and I wish I could help more than I do. And from what I have seen in my many decades of living here, these areas are totally devoid of this "open air drug market" characteristic. Not to say transactions don't happen they most certainly do, but that's true of every square foot of any US city, and the people in these places shield their behaviors from public eyes as well as anyone else that procures such things. My city is experiencing a staggering increase in violence this past year at a seemingly disproportionately faster rate than other nearby metro areas if my napkin math holds true and yet none of that violence is noted as occurring at these areas I'm describing. I think that's worth noting too.
The interplay of homelessness, mental health, drug dependency, economic struggle and societal rejection is a very complicated and interwoven problem. It's disappointing to hear that there are individuals who feel so self assured in the sources of these problems when it's evident that the qualities of these problems widely differ from place to place.
It's anecdotal, but I've definitely had rich friends get high in the open. Even when not homeless, there are a lot of reasons to hide an addiction from the people in your home and instead seek out locations where you can get high.
Both are probably true, some people get homeless due to addiction, and lack of a home keeps them relapsing, while also creating a social environment where other types of homeless persons - the mentally or physically disabled, elders, evacuees etc. - can get into drugs.
For a dealer, a dense community of chronic addicts is a cashcow, a market they can serve with much lower risk vs. catering to suburban teenage parties.
Both are true to different extents and in different cases.
Say you're living on the streets, mentally ill or just unhappy due to circumstances. Are drugs, a way to temporarily escape your current pain, going to be more or less tempting?
In what way are open drug scenes simple to solve? The research I've scene on cities that have had large ones is that "simple" draconian and "abstinence based" policies rarely have a positive effect and most places saw the best results from complex, multiprong approaches that are implemented with an understanding that it will take years to see results.
While open drug scenes are comorbid with housing crises, they are not the same thing. There is also overlap between the strategies for addressing them, but that overlap is not complete.
You give them a home. Then they are no longer homeless.
The fact that this is also demonstrably (in several different jurisdictions now) less costly than either imprisoning them or dealing with the other consequences of a significant homeless population should make it a no-brainer.
But too many people have internalized the idea that no one should ever have anything they haven't "earned", including the basics necessary for survival (food, shelter, clothing, clean water, etc), so there's always angry opposition to this. (Plus, of course, the racism angle, which is fairly significant, if often unspoken.)
For those that talk about giving people things they "have not earned", I note what we've taken from those same people -- the ability for them fend for themselves and live off the land.
With regard to the mechanism of "compensating for the lease of the part of our living planet they should be entitled by birth", I think any means tested or regulated approach is problematic. Instead provide to them rent checks for the slice of the world society has taken from them, and provided to others for private ownership / exploitation.
Let a market economy sort the development and allocation of resources.
We've already run the real life experiments, as suggested above. No need to try to delve into minds and motivation and life goals and other such nonsense (nonsense not in the sense that it's not true, but nonsense in that it doesn't bring any helpful ideas to the policy decisions that should be made.)
Housing first approaches are very effective, but simply providing housing isn't anywhere near a complete solution.
Drug addiction and the development of open drug spaces is not just a symptom of homelessness. If you solved housing and it became a human right, you would probably reduce the development of open drug spaces, but it certainly wouldn't be eliminated.
I'm not burying the lede, I am vigorously disagreeing with the point of view, and providing a citation.
As always happens in HN when you post the legal source of a paper, a helpful commenter has posted a link to a grey-market copy. I suggest you read it, then we can have an informed conversation about what you're claiming here, presuming it doesn't change your mind.
I wonder if all countries are this ideologically dogmatic. On one hand, you have PragerU. On the other hand, you have organizations like this that insist we need to give severe drug addicts private hotel rooms that they can trash.
You hear a lot about Finland's success with homelessness being credited to housing first. However, they also are very aggressive with compulsory psychiatric treatment, which this author would consider unethical.
There’s nothing contradictory with compulsory psychiatry, providing housing, and ending the war on drugs. The US’ hardcore line on drugs has clearly been an abject failure and its time to reverse the damage we’ve done before its too late.
Compulsory psychiatry is controversial, though. While "Housing First" (and potentially with some unconditionality attached) is controversial on the right, compulsory psychiatry is controversial on the left (and I think more so than Housing First on the right).
In the US, I guarantee that compulsory psychiatry would become corrupt in just a couple of years. You'd find people being sent to institutions for the mildest of infractions.
Back in the 1970s, there was a movie I watched, starring Alan Arkin, called The Other Side of Hell[0].
It was modeled on The Patuxent Institution[1], which has known some controversy[2].
There's a story (I think the movie references it), where someone was admitted for thirty days, for losing their shit at a traffic stop, and ended up doing thirty years.
It's a Real Bad Place. I met someone that did nine years, there, but he earned it.
Yeah, Germany has had similar cases, and then of course there's the Rosenhan Experiment [0].
That's why it's controversial. Housing First is controversial because it, too, will be corrupted if there's no additional action, and will mostly become the housing component of a UBI, likely with significantly higher costs as some people will not be able to function in the provided housing, damage it, and at the same time have the right to an undamaged home.
Putting people behind bars is less controversial on the right, spending the budget on social causes for eternity is less controversial on the left.
> some people will not be able to function in the provided housing, damage it, and at the same time have the right to an undamaged home.
At some point along that path, it seems reasonable for a society to say “okay, your next home is one that you cannot damage with lots of sturdy metal and concrete furnishings”.
Partially because it is super expensive; no doubt it could be made somewhat cheaper but the cost of even a normal "jail cell" is quite high compared to a stick-built building.
But "jails without locked doors" would be a good middle ground. Provide security like a jail, but the "inmates" are free to come and go.
It's a middle ground between jail and "regular" public housing.
Why might that be needed? If someone is an anti-social asshole who chronically destroys public housing, they will need some level of supervision (even if it's just to prevent them pouring concrete powder into the drains of an otherwise indestructible building, because the society who says everyone has a right to housing probably won't let that mean "without functioning plumbing").
The last is commonly called a jail; but then you have guards and other support staff - you can have the support staff without having it be an actual jail. They can be there to prevent fights/monitor health/etc, and you could have varying amounts.
It doesn't need to be a prison. That's why I phrased it as I did, but if you tear up two public houses and society says you have a right to a third, that third should be indestructible even if that means it's less comfortable than the ones afforded to people who manage to care for them properly.
Jon Ronson, a journalist, told a story[0] about a guy he interviewed in an Asylum that had pretended to be crazy to get out of a minor crime (I think shoplifting).
The promise to the Judge was, you do a month of psych ward, get some counseling, and get out. "Sweet!" he said, "Better than doing a year in the can for stealing". His psychiatrist branded him a sociopath and put him on some pills that he, a liar, didn't need. They changed him for the worse, a sane man entered the asylum and day after day he was turning into a raving lunatic. "I'm not crazy!", he said - but that was only more fuel for the doctors, as it was clearly something a crazy man would say to get out. The attitude around here was that if you yelled, you got more pills, maybe a beating by an angry male nurse too. If you stay quiet, you don't get out. "I don't need any of this! I was pretending! Please let me out!" he cried.
The nurses held him back and tossed him back into a padded room. As they dragged him, he kicked and screamed that he was not crazy and didn't need help, but it was all pointless. His psychiatrist later told Jon that the alternative was worse, that he was a liar, a pretender, and someone that willingly gets in here for any reason clearly belongs in the bobby hatch.
He would never get out again. Jon met him on his 18th year in the tin, he clearly wasn't right in the head when they talked, the pills, electroshock sessions and pointless talks with the Psychiatrist every week had clearly sapped this man of any energy he might have once had. He was a ghost of a man now, hunched, old and weak. What a punishment for stealing a can of beans.
> In the US, I guarantee that compulsory psychiatry would become corrupt in just a couple of years.
We already have court-ordered private drug and alcohol recovery programs (offered as an alternative to jail time) renting out their patients as unpaid labor to, eg, chicken processing plants and offering no actual treatment.
Sounds like an ugly place, but I doubt there's too many places like it. Addicts in early Recovery are not an especially reliable workforce. I think that SynAnon was like that, in the early days.
The problem with addicts, is that society hates them, so it's fairly easy to do what you want with them.
Also, a lot of rehabs and detoxes are run by addicts, and many of them have not progressed too far in Recovery, themselves.
Compulsory psychiatric treatment sounds insane, to me. Compulsory drug treatment amounts to assault, and "compulsory psychotherapy" isn't a thing - the patient has to want to engage with the treatment, or they're not really being treated.
They could be a law-abiding homeless person. You know: someone like you, maybe, that lost their home to their wife in a nasty divorce.
Or maybe they comply with the court's orders, because they don't want more severe sanctions? Fact is, some states seem to manage without throwing people in the can as soon as possible; some states use incarceration as a last resort.
[Sorry, upthread person; I wasn't trained on US constitution. As far as I'm concerned, jail, prison, penitentiary, reform school are all the same as incarceration. At least for the purposes of this discussion.]
Arguments for hotel rooms right now are often referring to purchasing actual hotel buildings and running them as shelters with private rooms - California and Washington have both done this on occasion.
I don’t like this kind of thinking. We should be evaluating the idea on its own merit, not tying to frame it as something acceptable because it is centrist - a word which is rapidly loosing any distinction.
Finland definitely does not have aggressive compulsory psychiatric treatment. About the only case where you can get involuntarily admitted is if you actively try or threaten to harm yourself or others.
Oh, we've got plenty of that, but still can't do much if anything about it. Lots of talk from both sides on how to handle it, but no real action because none of the "solutions" address the problem.
Workhouses used to be a thing until the mid 19 hundreds.
Apart from the obvious human rights issues it did not work very well.
Because the homeless are usually homeless for a reason and that does not go away if you put them in a prison and force them to do some mindless menial task.
But there has to be a humane inbetween. Why is it so horrible to try provide them a padded version of the real world? So they can get help and have a meaningful existence at the same time. Not a labor camp of course, but a place where they can have meaning instead of being kept alive on "life support".
If imprisonment and force is used which the article implies there is no "in between".
There is nothing wrong with programs helping people out of homelessness (exploitative forced labor is no such thing).
Keep in mind that a lot of people getting out of homelessness can be really hard to achieve. Usually because of the involvement of multiple problems like drug abuse (alcohol whatever...) and psychological or other health issues.
These are individual, need proper treatment and sometimes there is nothing one can do about it.
For example in France and Germany there are institutions for long term alcoholics who have given up and are basically allowed to drink under supervision until they die.
They are provided housing, food, health care and (regulated) alcohol.
It sounds weird but is way more humane than having them living on the streets with all the issues this entails.
Is your private for-profit workhouse willing and able to properly provide for those people too?
There’s a program like that in Seattle that has been running for a couple decades now, very successfully. Some of the people who live there even get sober eventually and move out. Most people have never heard of it, even locals. https://crosscut.com/2019/09/after-15-years-seattles-radical...
So what do we do with the person who urinates in his own piece of housing?
He's certainly mentally ill, but urinating in private place does not usually qualify as direct danger to the society, so no forced treatment can be applied.
Provide him a piss-proof house. It can be small, but make the entire thing a bathroom/shower that can be hosed off.
And every month or so hose it off for him.
The percentage of people who would actually continue to do so is small, but would be provided for. Anyone else in a similar house could just use the toilet.
There's a human rights concern leaving them in to wallow in their filth. Nevermind the expensive and depressing reality of dumping them in some strange tiled house. I also can't imagine them appreciating strangers forcing themselves in to spray everything.
I think OP was trying to get at the sad reality where severe mental illness is treated with some sort of loss in agency. You're still forcing some sort of solution they may not want and may work to sabotage.
You could advocate for encompassing services (e.g. regular visits from a nurse) but you'll quickly arrive at modern psychiatric facilities if for no other reason than scale and cost.
The article points out how homeless people aren't popular or often defended. This reality is probably the biggest force against homeless people. Most people don't even want to consider their existence at all, especially if you see them daily. I don't see how trying to divert attention from this harsh reality that exposes weakness in our ability to collectively solve problems actually helps anything. If private prisons we're outlawed would all of even most of homeless issues eventually just go away? Is that something people really believe?
The article makes it out to be some us VS them conspiracy. Where there's only a single black and white reason for the problem and can be resolved so easily...
Now, it is sus that some billionaire is bankrolling huge influence campaigns. But to believe housing will solve everything about homelessness is foolish.
Homelessness criminalisation push is because people just don't want to deal with all the shit homeless groups bring. Smelling like piss, hordes of beggers, make shift housing everything, the feeling of being unsafe and crime. Surprised?
The author works as a prison guard at a private prison in Louisiana and the book is interlaced with his experiences as a prison guard and the history of prisons in America.
The criminalization of the unhoused, as well as the policies that create unhoused people go far beyond private prisons.
As Ruth Gilmore and other abolitionists have meticulously detailed over decades, governments on all levels have helped build a system in which enormous flows of money exist to unhouse, cage and ultimately diminish the lives of thousands of people in the united states.
Incentives matter. On the other hand, the link here seems tenuous. Is 8VC so tied to private prisons that they run an astroturf campaign to lock up people without housing? Or does a significantly wealthy person have enough money spread around that a motivated reasoner can find just about any link they'd like?
The real voice behind these voices is The Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank founded by billionaire Joe Lonsdale. He is significantly invested in the private prison industry through his venture capital firm, 8VC.
Lobbyists from The Cicero Institute are currently pressuring lawmakers in states around the country to adopt laws . . .
Lobbyists from Cicero call their proposal the “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” . . . . It includes specific language designed to turn anyone sleeping in public into a criminal – at law enforcement’s discretion, which means enforcement will be uneven. It also proposes that states divert funding for permanent housing solutions into temporary encampment projects
The key to reaching a real solution is to build _consensus_ behind an _accounting_ solution that traces tax dollars all the way through to economic outcomes for these people. Otherwise any discussion about this is just people getting into the favorite parts of their feelings. e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU1V2GM1oTI&t=801s
well, I can tell you that "private prisons" are not the only cause for this push.
it's also that the other victims of the homeless don't particularly care for the needles, petty-thefts, fires, trash, vandalism, muggings, squatting, drugs, and rampant crime that goes hand-in-hand with the homeless encampments. sorry, i lost all sympathy out of personal experience with the 90 - 99% bad apples.
i don't dispute that private prisons might also see it in their best interests to push for this, but that's not the only reason. there's a hypothetical ideal, and there's probably plenty of real examples of sober, blameless, victimized houseless folks that just need help. but then there's the stark reality that 90-99% of the time is really not pretty.
Best thing, for the bad apples included, is to sober up in lockdown, not release back on the street.
"Prisoner #582954, your one year sentence has been completed. Do you currently have confirmed evidence of housing that is available to you immediately?"
"...No?"
"Prisoner #582954, you are under arrest for the crime of homelessness. You have the right to remain silent..."
I think private prisons and criminalization of homelessness are crimes on their own. How on Earth having such system lets the US call itself civilized country is beyond my understanding. Acts like this belong in my view to some barbaric societies.
Homeless people in US, in particular in cities like SF, are a perfect tool to raise money. SF's budget of >1bn USD means a ton of grift.
NGOs of all sorts descend on this money pile, with zero incentive to actually reduce homelessness - if they did, the money tap would dry up.
It is a self-reinforcing loop until the actual government steps in and resolves the matter. Very "unpopular" in this weirdly lefties/libertarian society.
Private citizens are behind the push for homeless criminalization, too. Enabling homelessness results in more of it, either by attracting the homeless from less friendly communities or by making it safer for people to make decisions that put them over the edge into or allow them to remain in the homeless lifestyle.
Does it still need to be said that the homeless aren’t a monolith of the victimized?
If you live in a community where the parks and trails have become unusable, where walking sidewalks has become unsafe, it’s a very different community experience that hasn’t fostered faith in the development of homeless policy in last twenty years.
Meanwhile, mental health institutions were closed enmasse due to Mental Health Systems Act of 1980[1][2] leaving the homeless folks largely … untreated, by force or not.
Private prisons are behind the criminalization of everything that in a civilized planet wouldn't be considered a criminal offense, like weed possession. They're just like hotels, with huge investments involved, and like hotels they need a constant influx of "customers" to keep the system working. The last thing a private prison system wants, along with everyone supporting them, is a reduction of crime rate.
Is it for the public good when it only benefits one group, namely the non-homeless? Because if police could arrest them, it would benefit you, but the homeless is getting a criminal record which would not only not benefit them, it would make their case even worse.
8VC investing in private prisons is something I was unaware of. They sponsor quite a few gen Z / crypto related events. Not sure I can comfortably support them anymore.
It’s just really confusing overall, given they brand themselves as a forward looking technology and life sciences investment firm. Private prisons seem like the antithesis of that.
I have absolutely no connection with private prisons. I do believe prison or labor camps are the best place for most true bums (drug addicts, criminals, mentally ill, etc). Obviously not for temporary homeless without drug or criminal record problems. Homeless bums are dangerous and a drain on society.
The fundamental reason for this is that the 13th amendment provided a convenient escape hatch to allow the continuation of slavery: just charge people with crimes - constitutionality of the law is not relevant, nor is the problem of finding someone guilty. Just send people to prison and suddenly you get free labor.
Here's the solution: require that _all_ revenue from prison labor go to the relevant state or federal government. The money received for labour by a given slave can only be passed on to the victim of a crime, capped to the financial loss caused by the crime in the case of financial crimes. For non-financial crimes with actual victims, all income from the slave for the entire period of incarceration must be provided to the victims. After that disbursement, the state or federal government (as appropriate) can take no more of the money than they are charged for housing the slave. every cent left over after that point must be put aside for when the slave is released, at which point they are provided their net earnings. Similarly prisons do not get to charge any kind of premium or markup on goods in their "stores", they also aren't allowed to charge for basic necessities or hygiene.
There are a few other requirements of course: any person incarcerated during trial ("bail") and subsequently release without jail time shall be compensated for the entire period of their incarceration at the rate of, say, the higher compensation of the prosecutor, judge, chief of police, or governor/president (as appropriate), multiplied by two in addition to any losses such incarceration has caused - again multiplied by two. If the person is found not guilty then rather than scaling by two, it should be scaled by four. If there were any illegal or unconstitutional acts by any agent of the government, then when can multiply that again by two - without preventing or impacting their right to file suit against the relevant agencies and individuals.
To me the first part of this is required to stop criminalizing people as being a trivial path to profit through "legal" slavery.
The latter is more generally needed in the US at least due to the abusive, unconstitutional, and generally illegal behavior of law enforcement. I'd say those fines should come out of the bonus, promotion, and pension funds of the relevant law enforcement agencies. Let's see how long police officers ignore illegal behaviour from the "bad apples" when the resultant lawsuits come out of the "good apple"'s wallets.
There's hundreds of videos like that on YouTube from many areas. It's easy to ignore when it's not near you.
Would you feel safe having this in your neighborhood? Would you be ok with your loved one taking a wrong turn somewhere and being stuck alone in any of these places? I'm not saying I love cops hassling homeless people for bullshit reasons, but there are some really out of control areas. How do you even start to deal with this?
Public funding for healthcare, including mental health and rehab, would be a good start. Where do these people go even if they want help for their issues? Therapy and rehab cost tens of thousands of dollars. And throwing them in prison is just an “out of sight, out of mind” solution. Good luck getting a job and straightening your life out with prison time on your record.
You shouldn’t criminalize homelessness unless you’re also offering an alternative that actually helps people. But America will never do that, instead we just punch down and make an example out of the lowest among us instead of trying large scale solutions. There are localized nonprofits to help with this sort of thing, but they’re underfunded and limited in scope.
> Where do these people go even if they want help for their issues?
The crux of the problem, as I see it, is that in many cases the mental-illness/addiction is too strong and these people vehemently reject actual help even when freely offered.
I'm not advocating "criminalizing homelessness", but am simply pointing out that in practice, "criminalizing homelessness" might be the only workable solution to starting to get these people actual help. Many of these people will reject all actual help unless forced to go through some kind of drug treatment or mental health program.
Is being imprisoned an effective addiction treatment or therapy program? Would the threat of prison manage to turn people away from heroin or schizophrenia?
There is no publicly funded drug treatment or mental health program to send them to. Prison is just a temporary lockup before they’re returned to the same environment they came from. Where are you proposing we send them?
FWIW, I think we’re saying close to the same thing. I’m fine with disallowing people from openly camping in cities, but only if there’s a massive safety net to send them to that will actually help. Currently the anti-homeless sentiment is just being ginned up by corporate prisons who want more money. That’s clearly not a real solution.
It feels like a "Peak Reddit" moment when somebody cares more about the label used than the actual problem.
The point of that harsh label isn't to mock anybody, but to try and get normal people aware of this problem. Most average people are not aware of shocking scenes like that existing in America.
(Very un)friendly reminder that state prison systems are just as complicit in this. Those beurocrats want to enlarge their fiefdoms just as bad as the private prison companies want to make a buck.
The US prison system has many issues, but the attention given to private prisons is extremely myopic and scapegoaty given that they account for less than 10% of the US prison population.
Alternatively, one could consider "private prisons" to be a symptom or symbol of a problem that is well understood to go beyond prisons that are 100% private. What about contractors, either for construction or operations? What about the people and companies who benefit from prison labor? What about the lawyers and others who make their money by helping to move people in and out of a too-large prison system? They're all part of an overly privatized prison system, even if they're not "private prisons" in the strictest sense. "Private prisons" is often intentional shorthand for the broader problem of imprisonment for profit, because it's easier to say. I doubt you'd find many people who are bothered by private prisons who are totally indifferent to all the rest. "Less than 10%" seems a bit myopic to me, in the sense of representing too narrow a focus on one factoid.
Yet account for a disproportionate amount of lobbying, which is what this article and discussion is about. They're literally helping to write laws to increase the overall prison population (public and private), which is a problem for a society with an already very dysfunctional criminal justice system.
Comparable. According to this report[1], 25% of offenders in the UK are estimated to have ADHD.
According to [2] the figures are roughly around 32.1% in Central and Northern Europe, 26.9% in North America, and 17.6% in "other" countries. The lowest prevalence being in Brazil with 6% of the prison population estimated to have ADHD. I'm wondering if the difference has to do with lack of data or with the nature of the crimes committed.
ADHD hasn't been recognized that long and there's significant overlap of symptoms between ADHD, PTSD and BPD. Both of which also can be reactions to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)[3], which have also been shown to link to criminality.
One study has also shown a correlation between ACEs and ADHD [4].
Do we have any modern-day data on how imprisonment affects homeless people? The people I see on the street who would probably get arrested if homelessness was criminalized are almost all in a very bad physical, mental, and emotional state. How are prisons expected to accommodate this group? Locking up mentally unstable and substance addicted people is not going to benefit private prisons (assuming that they are motivated purely by greed).
Since capitalism is strongly opposed to just giving money to people so they can sustain themselves actual real world needs to make up excuses to provide for people.
One method is criminalizing behaviors of the poor so you can lock them up to have an excuse to provide them with food and shelter for free.
It has additional benefit that you have excuse to give additional money to law enforcement, justice system and prison system for their economically unproductive activity.
US prison system is just effed up welfare system for a country that hates welfare but needs welfare.
The "thinktank" pushing criminalizing homelessness (from the article) is the Cicero Institute [1]. Here is their July 2022 update gloating about their anti-homelessness lobbying [2]. The Cicero Institute is the pet project for the predictably awful politics of billionaire Joe Lonsdale (eg [3][4][5]), co-founder of Palantir and General Partner and presumptive owner of 8VC who funds many companies [6].
My point is it's not quite accurate to say private prisons are lobbying for this. Their owners are.
For those unfamiliar, lobbying firms often write the legislation they push [7][8][9]. At the Federal level, lobbyists are often former Senators and Congressmen. Why? Part of this racket is that by tradition they retain "floor privileges" to their former body (as well as their relationships with sitting members). Yes, a lobbyist former Senator is allowed on the Senate floor.
It's worth noting that only about 6.5% of the US prison population [10] are in private prisons. Private prisons are still awful but they're symptomatic of a larger problem. Politicians love prisons for their districts not only because of jobs but because prisoners count for population for apportionment and redistricting but cannot vote. As an example, Alabama used $400m in Covid relief funds to build prisons [11].
The US loves to incarcerate people for long periods for minor offenses. A big part of this is creating a pool of forced labor (eg [12][13]). This is slavery economics.
This is the exactly the kind of analysis that's sorely needed in journalism. And "racket" is the appropriate term - it may be technically legal, but Americans are cursed by rackets of all kinds, often with the willing participation of those in government. It's sick and immoral - these people must be called out publicly by individual names.
A common argument is that, because only a small fraction of US prisons are private [1], it means private prison lobbying is a negligible problem. But this is a fallacy! The fraction doesn't matter, only the absolute amount of funds flowing through private prisons, that are available for lobbying. That, and the political connections of prison owners that make lobbying more effective.
True in the absolute, but you would expect that if those flows and influence would be so large, that fraction would increase too.
What's stopping a large scale privatization of the penal system? Could it be that there are incumbent interests too that compete with the private prisons, such as party appointees and horse trading in local politics which see that flow of public money as a vital resource? Could it be - since they seem to be winning the competition - that those interests in the public system have an even larger lobby power on crime prevention policies?
Not trying to take the side of the godawful private prison industry here, just tired of this simplistic leftist dichotomy: capital bad, state good. Policies are decided with political influence and power, and money is one of the many forms political power can take. A bad political system, set up to ignore the interests of society, will be gamed by both private interests and political insiders; the west tends to suffer from the first problem, but for most of the rest of the world it would be "a nice problem to have".
It's similar to the coal industry. We know that the coal lobby has an outsized influence despite the industry itself being tiny and shrinking.
Private juvenile facilities have the exact same problem because they encourage things like kickbacks for sending innocent kids into the system for funding. Neither should exist and should be fully abolished because the incentives for the companies in question go against behaving in a way that benefits society.
It's a lot more comforting to think that the Bloody Late Capitalism is responsible for this, rather than well off people in nice neighbourhoods who are just like your parents.
There wouldn't be a supply side for incarceration of homeless without mass demand.
I think most of the faults atributed to Capitalism are really Democracy not working properly. For profit prisons wouldn't even be a thing if corporate interests didn't have so much power over elected officials.
> I think most of the faults atributed to Capitalism are really Democracy not working properly.
Democracy in capitalism will always be biased to the interests of the capitalist class thanks to a lot of issues:
- Mass media that is under the editorial control of the super rich (Sinclair, Murdoch, German Axel Springer, Berlusconi, Bezos, ...)
- financial contributions towards political campaigns, including indirect contributions such as dirt-digging smear campaigns
- financial contributions in the form of party sponsoring (e.g. sponsoring rallies and conventions)
- higher-up party cadres and elected government officials being promised high-paying jobs in the private sector after leaving office (e.g. here in Germany, Gerhard Schröder who sold us out to Russia)
- most higher-up party cadres come from privileged families - someone who has to exit school at 16 to help make rent doesn't have the time to involve themselves in politics, nor do they have the network that people have whose parents already have been in politics. That's the reason why so many politicians are so detached from the realities of the working classes - and additionally, their "connections" that help them rise usually want their returns when the cadre reaches influential circles.
We need to radically transform our economy. Critical infrastructure (electricity grids, power generation, gas grids, oil refineries and pipelines, telecommunication, rail, road and air transportation, airports, railway grids) must be nationalized and serve the people and companies instead of the bottom lines of their owners, news media must first be nationalized and then be re-organized as an independent public trust (similar to PBS or the German ARD/ZDF TV/radio networks).
As an intermediate, at least media regulation needs to step up and mandate fair, unbiased and truthful reporting and a clear, visible separation of commentary and entertainment.
> We need to radically transform our economy. Critical infrastructure (electricity grids, power generation, gas grids, oil refineries and pipelines, telecommunication, rail, road and air transportation, airports, railway grids) must be nationalized
Are you going to do that without removing the influence of money over politicians? That'll create more problems, not less.
> As an intermediate, at least media regulation needs to step up and mandate fair, unbiased and truthful reporting and a clear, visible separation of commentary and entertainment.
That's fixing democracy, not capitalism (and I agree with that).
> Are you going to do that without removing the influence of money over politicians? That'll create more problems, not less.
It was how the system worked for decades until the neoliberal vultures privatized it everywhere they could - generations of public investment and wealth sold off for pennies to the highest bidder. The result was price gouging and profiteering, while at the same time investments in maintenance were left behind and now taxpayers have to foot the bill in "rescue" operations.
Critical infrastructure belongs in the hands of the parliaments, alone to keep some sort of accountability.
In practice nationalized industries end up serving no one but the politicians who nationalized them and the people who draw their salaries from them. Nationalized news media is even worse.
I agree Germany's public broadcasters aren't without their issues (e.g. there's a massive corruption scandal at RBB and a couple other stations at the moment), but there is no credible evidence about them doing shady or biased reporting (other than COVID deniers and the far-right complaining that their bullshit is being called out).
Our system was invented by the Allied occupation forces after WW2 precisely to enforce a publicly trusted news source as a prevention against lies and propaganda that led to the rise of the Nazis in the first place. Sad to see that the US hasn't dared and learned from the success - and now the US media system is objectively in shambles: Obvious crap like Tucker Carlson on a "news station", billionaires in control of major newspapers, and public trust in media fairness is at rock-bottom.
As for nationalized industries: see my reply to a sibling comment of yours.
The check for capitalism should be democracy (through regulation).
If money controls policy, then capitalism is working better than democracy. To balance it you either weaken capitalism or strengthen democracy. I think the latter is a better solution.
The 2 are diametrically opposed. While money exists, there exists a way to corrupt people. While huge concentrations of wealth exist, there exist ways to corrupt almost anyone.
Even people who don’t take bribes can be gradually manipulated into holding certain views via marketing/lobbying
How do you strengthen democracy against capital if capital accumulation directly results in political power under capitalism? You can't strengthen democracy against capital interests without weakening capitalism. Regulations literally weaken capitalism. Money is power. Democracy aims to distribute power to the people. Capitalism results in the accumulation of money by a few individuals.
If you're arguing we should balance this by reducing the power differential present in money, I'm all for that. But that means providing housing, medical care, food and a dignified quality of life to everyone and democratizing work places so money accumulation becomes largely a status symbol and not an alternative pathway to political power.
Exploitation of human beings is not a trait of capitalism; it is a trait of human beings. You create any sort of system that can be gamed to get an unfair advantage or privilege and there will be people that will exploit it.
You can nationalize all commerce and the same issue exists. You democratize all corporations and the same issue exists.
You can't get rid of all incentives. A government is an innately alluring entity for corruption. This is why regardless of how you organize your government or what economic model you adopt, you find corruption and oligarchs.
The best you can do is to have a system that is adaptable (i.e. laws can and do change) and a system that reduces the incentives for exploitation or limit the scope of which it can be exploited.
Add prisons to the list of things that should not be allowed to be privatized or for profit. I also include health care and weapons manufacturing. Those two industries have a much more massive influence on our political system and result in far more suffering. If health care was not for profit, practitioners would be more focused on preventing and healing rather than medicating and prescribing. If weapons manufacturing were not for profit, we would be avoiding wars and any use of weapons and killing.
This is a terrible business plan; the homeless don't have any money. They should criminalize exorbitant wealth instead. The richest 30% control 97% of total wealth.[1] Poverty is a virtue, wealth itself is strong circumstantial evidence of exploitation, theft and civil rights violations. Start with the 3300 or so billionaires, and incarcerate them until their wealth falls below 30%, then, if ever necessary, move down the pyramid in 2% increments. I'd invest in this type of venture, at least a little while, and dump it before my personal wealth breached the criminal threshold. But I don't see how there is any money in criminalizing poverty. It would not be sustainable.
The homeless don't have money but they have value in a system that allows using homeless as cheap/free labour, and when you receive state funding proportional to the number of people you're hosting. Incarcerating millionaires on the other hand is hard (they are less likely to commit obvious crimes), time consuming (long time in court), costly (they can pay armies of lawyers), and more likely to fail if they have the right connections. The homeless don't have family, friends or business partners to help bail them out.
The cost of incarcerating the homeless is never ending and must be paid for by everyone else, whereas the rich can afford their incarceration without cost to taxpayers. If the crime is wealth, all the money in the world can't defend against it.
Companies? They're usually scrappy nonprofits that don't have much in the way of funds, compared to the prison-industrial complex bankrolled by state governments.
In cities like New York and San Fran the homeless non-profit sector is a billion dollar industry, bankrolled by city and state governments, with many shady characters pulling in millions of dollars a year.
>This year, the city has directed $2.6 billion to nonprofits to operate homeless shelters, and officials already know they have a problem with some of them. Nine of the 62 groups that run shelters are on an internal city watch list for issues that include conflicts of interest and financial problems, according to records reviewed by The Times. All of them continue to receive city funding.
The state of California funnels more than $3 billion dollars a year into these homeless non-profits while cities like San Fran funnel hundreds of millions more - without doing much of anything to mitigate, much less solve, the homeless crisis there.
This is absurd. With that kind of funding the city could build pretty good homes for the entire homeless population in just a few years. Stable living conditions is the first step to get your life in order.
More than absurd, it is completely corrupt. Unfortunately many people are operate under the false assumption that the homeless are slipping through the cracks because we aren't "devoting enough resources to the problem". Like most of our problems, the volume of money we throw at it isn't the issue. The issue is how that money is spent and who gets to decide how we spend it. New York City spends $38 billion dollars a year on "education" - over $30,000 per student. Despite this massive spending, more than half of NYC public school students were not proficient in reading or math (and this is data from 2019 - before the lockdowns - these numbers have gotten dramatically worse).
Private Prisons make this to increase their "customers", or the funds the receive.
Do you believe that homeless shelters would like to increase homelessness, or are in competition with private prisons for persons ending up in their facility?
It's weird people aren't talking about this. CA alone spends multiple billions every year on homelessness, bans private prisons, and has the worst homelessness situation. Yet we're supposed to believe that the dominant force behind homeless policy is private prisons?
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to
sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their
bread." -- Anatole France
More on-topic, I think Afghanistan, with its factions of warlords
would be a good model to look forward to for any nation that erodes
the foundation of the Rule of Law by privatising institutions of
criminal justice and so regressing State monopoly on violence to
whichever thugs with the most guns and manpower are willing to take
someone's buck.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal