Private Prisons Are Behind the Push for Homeless Criminalization
invisiblepeople.tv
invisiblepeople.tv
How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?
One that is not "maximise engagement" but "maximise understanding of important shit"
Thank you for posting
How do we define "real journalist" in a way other than "curates news in a way that I personally approve of"?
Ironically, this is not a real no true Scotsman.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
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.
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.
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
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).
How about, you know, philosophers and other learned people who's life job is to study it?
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?
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.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstre... [2] https://lumendatabase.org/faceted_search?sender_name=Europea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
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.
My hunch is because of some combo of
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.
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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.)
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FWIW, outlets like Democracy Now!, Thom Hartmann, and Project Censored try to day light these memory hole stories.
Justice for Sale – Part 3: Greed Breeds Corruption [2015] https://www.projectcensored.org/justice-for-sale-part-3-gree...
Project Censored's Yearly Top 25 Most Censored Stories is a treasure. Allows me to binge less and periodically catch up on stuff I've missed.
https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...
Maybe historians would be better stewards of meaningful “news”.
[0] https://www.projectcensored.org/ [1] https://www.projectcensored.org/category/the-top-25-most-cen...
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'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.
PBS NewsHour is the other source I've used because it tends to be less rage-baiting, but this fact-based presentation is great.
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’
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.
Canada is not a country, it's a corporation, and should be held accountable as both. It has 0 claim to the land and they know it.
They launder money too
Fk off racist pigs
(No idea who first said that. Someone on the internet, probably.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
But of course he recused himself from the case for the obvious conflict of interest right? Right???
Portugal does it, with the associated nefarious effects.
You think it's gonna help?
That would be the defintion of "socializing costs" while "privatising revenues".
Chicago.
"Chicago's Parking Meter Deal a Lesson in 'Worst Practices" - https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a...
] 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
A sure sign of corruption. An honest lease would be short, so that it can simply not be renewed if problems arise.
is an approximately equally sure sign of corruption.
This is over ten years old. I wonder what those cities wound up doing.
> 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids
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.
Assuming the system will work the way you expect it to work, and not fail into more lucrative modes that are trivial to predict.
"I can't think of a flaw, so my plan must be flawless" is a pretty arrogant position and rarely leads to good plans.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
Left-wing article on the subject: http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-...
Mostly center-right, rural article on the subject: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-sta...
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.
So abuse in the system is rampant by parking enforcement. Everyone I know who drives in the city has crazy stories of bullshit tickets or tows.
Chicago is also the city that got caught shortening yellow light duration after installing traffic cameras which wrote automated tickets.
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.
prison: restricted
Just because a word has one meaning, doesn't mean it's the only meaning.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM
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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/20195/06...
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.
Oh, God. Don't tell Judge Judy. :)
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.
>>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.
> No one is arguing against that.
There's nothing wrong with arguing against that, and there are plenty of people who argue against that.
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.
Perfect riposte, indeed.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Puritans_in_Nor...
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.
I am also forced into labor. I suppose I technically COULD just not work. But then I'd have no place to live and no food to eat.
That isn't really very much of a choice, is it?
I feel like you're missing the "needs" part that the rest of society has.
Federal prisons banned cigarettes from commissaries in 2006 and smoking in general in 2014[0].
And many states have restricted tobacco use in their jails and prisons[1].
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/12/05/smoking-offi...
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.
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.
People are in prison because of their own antisocial behavior, and you think that others should bear the costs of keeping them there?
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.
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.
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.
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.
At what point do you think being in prison should differ from being free then?
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.
The prison sentence is the loss of your liberty and the mark on your record. Not being sold as forced labor.
If we don't want to pay for prisons, maybe we shouldn't have so many people imprisoned.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...
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:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/pa-kids-for-cash-...
The infamous Kids for Cash scandal you mentioned was in Pennsylvania, not a Southern state that rebuilt "many of the same [prewar] power structures".
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).
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...
> 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?
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics...
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).
So what is the definition then?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
A lot of "businesses" would straight up collapse without this free labor
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.
United States — 629
Rwanda — 580
Turkmenistan — 576
El Salvador — 564
Cuba — 510
Palau — 478
British Virgin Islands (U.K. territory) — 477
Thailand — 445
Panama — 423
Saint Kitts and Nevis — 423
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...
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"
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.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-...
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.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
El Salvador 605 Rwanda 580 Turkmenistan 576 American Samoa (USA) 538 Cuba 510 United States of America 505
I'd still consider this horrible, but making a point is no reason to use dodgy sources.
From: https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
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.
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:
https://www.prisonstudies.org/research-publications?shs_term...
https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-popul...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/appendix_countries_2021....
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.
Glad to hear any thoughts about this.
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?
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).
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.
Can you expand on this?
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?
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.
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.
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?
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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?
From https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%80%D1%85%D0%B8%D0%BF...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...
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.
Either they are overly violent or overly incarcerating people, both are "something bad"
Statistica: https://www.statista.com/statistics/452902/admission-rate-in...
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.
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.
See https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ and https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/u-s-prison-po... for some numbers - prison populations massively spiked over the course of a couple decades, but while crime rates have come down massively prison populations have not declined nearly as much.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
(Or course this about largest incarceration is bullshit too, but hey, he needs to be making money somehow, right?)
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.
1M / 1.4B is increasing the incaceration rate by 70.
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.
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.
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.
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.
United States - 629
Canada - 104
Greenland - 126
Mexico - 166
Germany - 69
Russia - 325
Iceland - 33
Japan - 38
Norway - 49
China - 121
Vietnam - 128
England and Wales - 130
Australia - 160
Hungary - 169
Iran - 228
Lithuania - 216 (= highest of all EU countries)
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?
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.
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.
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?
https://believehousing.org.au/housing/how-housing-benefits-p...
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)).
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.
So are/were cage hotels; further in that page,
> A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security
and more at http://historyapolis.com/blog/tag/cage-hotel/ ).
> 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.
Sad and deliberate. We have more than enough to expansively build houses for everyone, but we don't simply to make a few richer.
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.
i believe that, ironically, the less progressive jurisdictions already provide this service while the more "progressive" districts have not yet made it mandatory.
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.
> a couple of unemployed drug addicts can turn an otherwise neat and tidy house into a shithole.
Thanks for showing us your very progressive view of the poor.
Drug addicts need help and that has nothing to do with housing, same goes for people with mental health issues.
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?
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.
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.
How is this actually done in practice?
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."
https://www.twincities.com/2022/10/10/after-st-pauls-concess...
>end homelessness
Unless you can end poverty, pick one.
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.
Or from countries that aren't the US.
No one wants the obvious solution, so the victims must bear responsibility.
Shack-based safe rest villages (temporary transitional housing) are $30+k/unit. https://www.portland.gov/ryan/funding-safe-rest-villages but it is taboo to have barriers, so sometimes they have to be shut down because they are too dangerous. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/05/28/old-town-homeless...
Do not underestimate the homeless industrial complex.
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2018/09/07/one-cost-estimate...
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.
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.
Homelessness is not just a cost of living issue. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/terri-zinze...
> 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.
9% of prisons are private, which is 9% too many, but it's the citizens who have to endure open drug scenes who are behind the push to end them.
[0]: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/259053
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.
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
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.
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'm not an expert, it doesn't make sense for me to do more than point to the expert opinions which I consider valuable here.
It's none of the things in your paragraph.
Open drug scenes are not caused by homelessness so housing the unhoused does not in itself solve the problem. It takes more than that.
One of the reasons I care about this is the evidence that housing-first policies fail if and when there are open drug scenes.
-------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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inside-okimaw-oh...
-----------------
>> > 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 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).
So I don't buy the argument that the government will encourage harm because they make money off of it.
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/08/10/...
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.
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.
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.
>> Link: Not what I read, but shows some of the same or similar data I remember. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-glob....
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.)
Downvoting comments you disagree with is allowed in the guidelines.
Complaining about downvotes will reliably get you downvoted.
Welcome to Hacker News.
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.
But thanks for explaining.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Odds are that proposed solution would help some people, but would fail in the majority of cases and cost an absolute fortune.
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.
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.
Go figure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudo...
It is about what can go wrong when "doctors are notoriously difficult to get any kind of opiate from now unless you REALLY need it".
It is been a while since I read it, I don't remember whether it touches on homelessness.
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.
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.
Take that as you will.
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.
https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/syringe-services-progra...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://whatweowethefuture.com/
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-ow...
But if only certain locations have them, then things will congregate there.
Or are you simply shouting into the void? We are not the void, and we don't appreciate the shouting.
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].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity:_Why_Having_Too_Littl...
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).
I think there is delineation between public drug use and open drug scenes. The latter is concentrated.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.)
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 hadn't heard it either, and the PDF didn't load for me.
Here is the full paper: https://sci-hub.se/10.1159/000259053
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXyXYJg9SyY
You get a good sense at 21:00 in the video.
When people who do have a house to live in gather to do drugs, we call it the suburbs.
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.
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.
What is it ? What is the best way to describe it ?
Can it be summarized as Hamsterdam (from HBOs' The Wire) ?
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.
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.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078043/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patuxent_Institution
[2] https://www.petition2congress.com/ctas/citizens-against-crue...
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.
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”.
Why can't we just build sturdy housing that's difficult to damage?
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.
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").
1. build normal housing
2. build "blast-proof" housing
3. build "inmate-proof" housing
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.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c
Don't yell at me if I don't get the details right, I doubt it matters if he stole a can of beans or a bottle of whisky.
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.
- Community service
- Fines
- Curfews
- Binding-over
- Suspended sentences
Those are the alternatives that leap to mind; i'm sure there are many more choices for sentencing magistrates.
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.]
It's a massively inefficient "solution" that does nothing to address the issue. Provide housing, don't give a ton of money to hotel chains.
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.
Based on what?
You think the author would be against additional mental health resources for homeless people? I highly doubt it.
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.
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.
What's next?
Very few mentally ill people realize they need help.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Trinken-im-Pflegeheim...
I think have a seen something similar from France i am sure similar institutions exists elsewhere too.
As i said drinking is supervised and from what i could gather that even keeps the most extreme excesses in check.
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?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison
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.
I wonder if the shoe will ever drop and they figure out that preventative welfare is cheaper and better for everyone (except 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.
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
― Milton Friedman
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.
"...No?"
"Prisoner #582954, you are under arrest for the crime of homelessness. You have the right to remain silent..."
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.
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.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/96th-congress/senate-bill/1177
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
Edit: At least not their government and those among ordinary people pushing for such measures, just like in any other country, including mine.
Can't find a good job to afford a place to live? Good luck finding a good job once you have a criminal record.
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.
It’s a very utilitarian perspective I guess? Really lacking in heart or soul though.
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.
But the question remains, what the hell do you do when there's literal zombies roaming the streets in America? That is not hyperbole.
> KENSINGTON AVE PHILADELPHIA AT NIGHT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOBoDT-3oM0
> Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Avenue, What happened today, Aug, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1Kf-1qd6Y&t=57s
>The Oakland, California Homeless Problem is Beyond Belief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRWmKh13b50
> WALKING THROUGH LOS ANGELES UNBELIEVABLE OUT OF CONTROL HOMELESS SLUM | HOMELESS CRISIS IN AMERICA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WVDieQ8MsI&t=9s
> ZOMBIELAND TENT CITY METHADONE MILE BOSTON MASS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCgNaITiCXY
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?
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.
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.
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.
You propose imprisoning them? I'd legalize drugs, the prohibition is just contributing to the conditions you're complaining about.
Probably the first step is not dehumanizing them into monsters. They are literally not "literal zombies."
The core problem is that we care more about not seeing or knowing about the problem than we do actually solving the 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.
So you're telling me that a private corporation are attempting to maximize profits ?
Now I've never!
In related news, maybe things of interest to the public should be owned by the public.
https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/508829#:~:text=ADHD%....
I wonder if the homeless population might have the same percentage of people with 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].
Sources: 1. https://www.adhdfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06...
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4301200/
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 capitalism.
[1]: https://ciceroinstitute.org/
[2]: https://ciceroinstitute.org/july2022update/
[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/03/vc-joe-lonsdales-tweets-ab...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/oct/28/us-tech-invest...
[5]: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=joe+lo...
[6]: https://www.8vc.com/companies
[7]: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397...
[8]: https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/asbestos-sharia-...
[9]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk
[10]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...
[11]: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/07/01/alabama-diverts-40...
[12]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-29/Slavery-is-alive-and-k...
[13]:https://innocenceproject.org/13th-amendment-slavery-prison-l...
[1] Twenty-six states and the federal government incarcerated 99,754 people in private prisons in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. - https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
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".
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.
that said, I don't think 8% is small, and the relative growth, the shift from public to private prisons is remarkable:
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...
and also, as a European I was shocked to learn about voter disenfranchisement in the US as a regular common part of many convictions.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felony-disenf...
voting right is a human right.
There wouldn't be a supply side for incarceration of homeless without mass demand.
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.
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.
Even people who don’t take bribes can be gradually manipulated into holding certain views via marketing/lobbying
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Does it really? I have never heard of a cooperative exploiting its workers the way amazon does.
>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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/nyregion/jack-brown-homel...
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.
https://sfstandard.com/public-health/the-standard-top-25-san...
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/new-york/districts/new-...
Why don't the homeless people lobby? They have every right to too!
"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