I mean .. yes? Crime is committed by people. To control crime is necessarily to control people, to coerce them into not performing certain acts. Laws, courts, police: all systems of control.

would you consider, say, making camping in public a felony the same sort of “control” as education, affordable housing, job opportunities, etc.? specifically with respect to solving homelessness.

That's a coercive form of control, whereas affordable housing and job opportunities are not in and of themselves. However, some jurisdictions can make them coercive by making them an opportunity people cannot refuse without legal consequences.

(Both this and my previous post should be regarded as descriptive not normative, that is a statement of how things can most coherently be described rather than how they ought to be)

Anti-homeless spikes are control. Unsleepable bench designs are control. Heck, even a sign can be control.

right, that’s basically my point: i think we can draw a distinction between a coercive control here (i.e. forcing someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do), and an incentive/root issue correction (i.e. encouragement/elimination of need).

to suggest that both approaches are basically same because the end result is the same, would be like saying all discussion is manipulation.

put bluntly, if people commit crime we could end all crime by killing all people. clearly this is worse than any suggestion thus far :)

If you can be controlled through access to alcohol, I'd say you have a problem.

This is true, the hard truth is that many people do have a problem with alcohol.

Yes, but I doubt a government could "control people" at a societal level through control of alcohol addicts.

The article isn't about controlling people, so much as controlling the access and availability of alcohol. And not everyone who has a problem with alcohol is necessarily and addict. Consider the difference between a wedding reception with and without an open bar and the likelihood of drunken incidents. Compare that with a reception where there is no alcohol served at all. True that a hard-core addict can sneak some in, but the chances of the rest of the guests behaving badly reduces substantially and proportionately with their ease of access to drinks.

The article isn't, but the post I replied to is.

> not everyone who has a problem with alcohol is necessarily and addict

I said if you can be controlled via alcohol you have a problem (with alcohol, an addiction) not that everyone who has a problem with alcohol can be controlled through it. I would argue anyone who can be controlled via alcohol is an addict, and not just someone with a problem.

Ok, then back to the wedding reception example. Imagine someone who is not an alcoholic, just a regular person who has a drink now and again. This person, if given access to an open bar, might have a few too many drinks and cause a scene, but if it was a paid bar would only have one or two and be fine. The person's behavior could therefore be 'controlled' by changing the availability to drinks; i.e. putting a cost on each drink reduces how many they have and the corresponding bad behavior they could potentially engage in if they had too many.

But then, that would be "crime" control legit, not "in the name of".

I don't understand what you mean by this.

Evidence and strategies for genocide in name of people control.