We continue from Crime Deterrence; Our Groundhog Day of Slaughter, Part 1. You might also look at
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Like the other great social issues, attitudes towards crime are cyclic. As American attitudes oscillate between liberal and conservative poles, crime follows the swing. News outlets, so responsible for informing us on where we are today, tend to focus on a single point in time. This resulting collective amnesia about where we have been leads to Santayana’s curse: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There are still some constants:
Even more than the past, attitudes towards crime are tightly bound to political identity.
The bumpers of argument are the occasional-but-too-frequent brutality of law enforcement, and the suffering of victims.
Recidivism among those who have served sentences is extremely high. Since 8% of American adults are felons, incarceration of all of them would multiply the prison population by a factor of 12, to 24 million.
The skewing of felony convictions along socioeconomic lines results in perceptions that compromise consent of the governed.
Implied arguments, violating strong taboos, remain unspoken. The liberal point of view is that the state must act in a blameless fashion, even when possibly compromising law-and-order. The no-cash-bail laws are so motivated, by the deaths, or at least deprivations of liberty, of incarcerated individuals before trial has disposed of the presumption of innocence. The unspoken conservative counter argument is based on the arithmetic of victims of those released without bond.
When crime statistics improve, they are used by some, frequently representing disadvantaged communities, to assert that society is curing itself, reducing or eliminating the need for policing and incarceration. When crime statistics worsen, broad support for law enforcement resumes. This cycle is interrupted by infrequent but noteworthy errors of law enforcement that range from manslaughter to murder.
Tearing down the old jail and building a new one, as per Rikers Island, will not stop misbehavior of correctional officers. The problem of Rikers, or any jail, is not in the real estate.
Instinctive approaches, “Let’s get tough”, and “Let’s be lenient” remain popular memes, because of the poverty of alternatives.
Religion, formerly the custodian of both morality and law, has been supplanted by systems more respectful of the individual. As a nonreligious person, I am personally fine with that. But the sophistication of modern liberalism may not be as compelling, or even understandable to the potential criminal as an omniscient god whose punishments are inescapable. Nevertheless, Western Europe, where crime rates are far lower, is less religious than the U.S. This implies there is a secular, cultural factor in U.S. crime rates.
Deterrence does not work as well as it should. Ideally one incarceration should prevent the transition to criminality of a hundred individuals, but it doesn’t. Every apprehension, trial, and incarceration is a burden on the state, and the loss of a potentially productive individual.
Ingrained attitudes, both religious and secular, are barriers to innovation.
This is the cycle, the swing of a pendulum. How can we stop the swing?
To be continued.