This made me chuckle out loud, well done!
> There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.
Yes, there are biases against various races and classes, but they absolutely don't override the bias against criminals. Our system is flawed, but it's far from "about terrorizing and brutalizing certain demographics". This kind extreme hyperbolic rhetoric isn't helpful, and insofar as it motivated the de-policing and catch/release prosecution policies which led to the violent crime surge, it has done far more harm to minority communities than the criminal justice system could hope to do.
I don't actually know if this is true, intuitively. The highest-crime areas are not the areas with the least police. The lowest-crime areas are not the areas with the most police. Crime seems to respond as a phenomenon to other dysfunction of society, not because there is opportunity to commit them.
So, I don't know, can you educate me more about the relationship between police presence and its causation statistically towards crime? [To be clear, I'm not asking in bad faith or whataboutism. I'm genuinely trying to become more educated in this as a layperson who doesn't study crime to any degree.]
> In June 2020, Harvard economist Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi released a paper showing evidence of the Ferguson effect. Across five cities where a deadly shooting that went viral preceded an investigation into crime and policing, they found that the violent crime rate increased, resulting in an additional 900 homicides and 34,000 excess felonies across two years. They suggest that this was caused by changes in the quantity of policing. Other theories, such as changes in community trust, were not supported by the data.
A lot of crimes are not one-offs but something done over and over again until they're caught. This applies for both (sexual) assault and property theft. Laws against those need to be enforced even if the first X don't involve prison, because the people stealing hundreds of dollars of merch every week or picking fights are making their communities worse in systemic ways, and after a certain point separation from society is the only way to protect everybody else from the antisocial behavior (and serve as a deterrent).
No, I am not affected by a single instance of someone taking candy from Walgreens. But I am when so much theft occurs that everything valuable is locked up, when prices are raised to account for shrinkage, or when retail operations close down. I am when I have to tell people to leave nothing in their car and not to park in certain spots with frequent breakins, or when I can't leave my bike locked up outside even for a few minutes, or when I can't get packages delivered to my address anymore because it will be immediately stolen if I'm not there.
The victims in aggregate aren't just the people or businesses being stolen from, but all the other people in the community who subsequently have to live in a food desert, pay high prices, or can't even get deliveries any more because there is so much theft.
Scandinavian countries have generous social systems which reduce the demand for crime in the first place. We could have that too.
There are a lot of naive takes in this thread. Prison is objectively and disproportionately racist and classist. It's not so much about deterring crime as about terrorising and brutalising certain demographics.
For the winners to feel better about themselves, the losers have to lose hard. It's essentially just sadism.
This has nothing at all to do with preventing criminality, as the penal systems in other countries - notably Scandinavia - have proved.