More Cops, Less Jail

Ross says folks who'd like to see the US move to a more humane criminal justice system can't beat something with nothing, and had better propose an alternative means of getting the crime-control effects of mass incarceration. His idea: more cops on the beat:

One possible answer, I think - again, drawing a bit from The Wire as well as from public policy research - is more cops on the beat. This could be the twofer that (right-wing) prison reformers offer skeptical voters: Lighter sentences and more emphasis on rehabilitation on the one hand, and larger, more active police forces to pick up the slack (and ideally gain even more ground) on the other.

I think there's a lot to that. Even better in some ways, though not as good in political terms, would be to have more parole officers. A year on parole is obviously far more humane than a year in prison. And even a closely monitored parolee is less expensive than an additional prisoner. But a well-designed parole system can have almost as much crime control oomph as more prison beds. The trick is that it only works if you put enough money into hiring parole officers that they can really monitor their parolees. Right now, the system depends very heavily on infrequently enforced but very severe sanctions for, e.g., people who fail drug tests. With more resources you could switch that around to a much more effective system with less severe penalties but a higher cost of getting caught.

Comments

And the more people who are cops, the broader the sample, the less likely they'll just be all the pugnacious meatheads from high school who were too afeard to sign up for the Marines. I have a couple cop friends who are nice, reasonable, non-racist, understanding guys. They are the exceptions, and often get driven out or beaten down quick. And I live in San Fran-fucking-cisco, so...

Posted by Gregorio | August 16, 2007 5:56 PM

We don't even HAVE parole in the federal system.

Parole is an excellent policy in a wonky penology sense, but unfortunately, it seems to be wholly unworkable in the political arena. All it takes, it seems, is one or two high-profile crimes by parolees before the public starts clamoring for an elimination of parole altogether.

We really should just lock up every violent offender for life and be done with it. Because the public attitude seems to be that if there's any chance whatsoever that someone will commit a crime after being released, we should just play it safe and keep them locked up. If this is the direction the public wants, and they don't understand that there's a cost to incarcerating so many people for so many years, then why fight it?

Posted by Steve | August 16, 2007 5:57 PM

Well-funded Education, including Pre-K and Childcare, coupled with a comprehensive social welfare and prevention-minded health-care system, in addition to a decriminalization of all drug usage and treatment first mentality, not to mention extensive public works projects and 4 hour work weeks and ponies and kittens for everyone, would be really nice. I just wanted to say that, because it's fucking true. And just because we can't have ALL of that, doesn't mean we can't get some of it. The closer you get to the universal ponies and kittens, the lower the crime rate would go.

Posted by Gregorio | August 16, 2007 6:10 PM

I wonder whether Steve's life-for-everything solution might mitigate for a realization of the social costs of our high incarceration rate policies (the first time a Senator's kids goes away for life for a bar fight or pot possession may change the political climate a little) or for greater incentive for the rich and powerful to game the system (no Senator's kid ever gets penalized for anything ever again)?

Posted by justin | August 16, 2007 6:14 PM

I think it's rather naive to think you can put a bunch more cops on the streets and not wind up with a bunch more people getting arrested and going to prison.

Posted by too many steves | August 16, 2007 6:24 PM

I wonder whether Steve's life-for-everything solution might mitigate...

I assume you realize that I was not actually advocating life-for-everything, but simply bemoaning how fucked up our criminal justice system is as a result of the perverse political incentives in this area.

Our only solution is tough on crime, tough on crime, tough on crime. If crime keeps on being a problem, throw another 5 years on all the sentences and try again. If anyone opposes this "solution," run political ads against them saying they want to let violent criminals out of jail, beat them in the election, and repeat as necessary.

If this process is going to play out over and over again, it actually makes no difference if we just cut to the chase and make every sentence into life imprisonment right now.

Posted by Steve | August 16, 2007 6:31 PM

The great thing about increasing the number of police on the beat, regardless of its effectiveness in reducing actual crime, is that it definitely reduces the fear of crime. Given the huge disconnect in the last decade or so (in the US and the UK) between perception of crime and the reality, this can only be a good thing. It would also arguably be a Keynesian mechanism that right wingers could support, but I'll leave that side to the economist.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | August 16, 2007 6:45 PM

After Alex got out of the prison, he found that Pete, Georgie, and Dim had taken jobs as police officers.

Posted by Anthony Burgess | August 16, 2007 6:47 PM

Pardon me if I don't chug the milk-plus here, but when I see a police car, I get more afraid: it's like confirmation I'm in a bad neighborhood.

~Christopher Bitchens

Posted by Gregorio | August 16, 2007 6:53 PM

Who are you? John Lott?

Posted by Chris DeMuth | August 16, 2007 7:10 PM

Liberals got to revamp the criminal justice system in the 1960s, driving down the imprisonment rate, and the homicide rate doubled from 1964-1975.

Is there any reason to think liberals (excuse me, progressives) have learned anything from their past mistakes? Matt's credibility on this topic would be a little higher if he would first make a posting explaining in depth all the mistakes liberals made in the past about crime, and how they've now learned from those mistakes.

Posted by Steve Sailers | August 16, 2007 7:19 PM

For starters, here's the Crime Misery Index, showing the homicide rate and the prison rate on the same graph going back to the 1920s:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/introducing-crime-misery-index.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 16, 2007 7:21 PM

It's been mentioned in this thread, but it deserves to be emphasized: reformation of our drug laws is the sine qua non of any serious effort to make our criminal justice system work again.

Of course, since there is absolutely no political support for anything along these lines, that pretty much means that there will be no serious efforts to make our justice system work.

Posted by Leo | August 16, 2007 7:22 PM

"We don't even HAVE parole in the federal system."

There is supervised release for Federal prisoners, they just call it Probation, not Parole. On the state level Parole is post release, and probation is instead of imprisonment. For the Federal system, its all Probation.

Anyone suggesting more Parole officers as the solution to anything has not had any experience working with the parole system. I'm not even talking about POs, which are a mixed bag - some really good, most just filling space - but the hierarchy. Nowhere else have I seen such a mix of incompetence, arbitrary use of power, secrecy and paranoia. (I mean first hand, the Bush administration is - of course- much worse).

That isn't true for Federal Probation system - Federal POs are - as a whole - great to work with.

How about:
1. Alternative forms of incarceration - boot camps, etc.
2. Alternatives to incarceration - probation for non-violent low level drug offenders
3. Education - there are programs in place that teach people trades behind bars, they aren't common enough.
4. Job Placement - help people get jobs so that they don't need to rejoin the underground economy.
5. Living wages - if you had to choose between trying to live in NYC on $8 an hour and making over $1k a week selling crack, what would you do?
6. End racial/class discrimination in the judicial system. Impossible to do, really, but an essential first step in addressing criminal justice reform.

Posted by justaguy | August 16, 2007 7:24 PM

Of course, since there is absolutely no political support for anything along these lines, that pretty much means that there will be no serious efforts to make our justice system work.

Our justice system--and the Drug War--are working fine for what they're supposed to do. They're just not supposed to be the most efficient way of reducing crime. They make some people rich, support certain kinds of structural privilege (not least based on race), and meet political needs.

One way to see this is to ask yourself what Matt and Ross Douthat's solutions are meant to accomplish. Reduce crime more humanely? What kinds of crime? What is and isn't a crime is also a political decision. Are we going to continue criminalizing drug use? To what end?

More than half the battle is in defining your desired end state. Mine would be something like "less theft and violent crime, at lower human and economic cost." But the truth is that that's an incidental goal to most of the people who make policies. They want to remain politically viable, earn maximum overtime, advance in their careers, whatever.

Posted by Antid Oto | August 16, 2007 7:35 PM

Imprisoning people is beneath us at this stage in our cultural evolution, but that's a topic for another day. And so are arguments about making the criminal justice system more humane.

First we must deal with the 900 pound gorilla in the room: A good portion of the jail cells are occupied by people who are there because they like the wrong recreational drug. People as innocent as their fellow tobacco and alcohol using compatriots.

Momentum is building to end the drug war. Don't waste your breath telling me how to humanely incarcerate innocent people. It's a lie.

Next up for Mr. Yglesias: How to successfully prosecute the Iraq war.

Posted by epistemology | August 16, 2007 7:38 PM

His first good idea evar, I chalk it up to stopped clock right twice a day kinda luck.

Plus, if you are trying to maximize the value of law enforcement and equate cost of getting caught = chance of getting caught * likelihood of getting caught

you will forever end up with the result where infrequent but highly punitive punishment makes the most sense.

You need to be maximizing another variable for there to be a different result. I suspect that most people think that punishing is the best result.

Posted by mickslam | August 16, 2007 7:39 PM

All it takes, it seems, is one or two high-profile crimes by parolees before the public starts clamoring for an elimination of parole altogether.

I was thinking the same thing in connection with the horrific crime committed up in Cheshire, CT recently, where two parolees raped and burned to death a wife and two daughters (somehow the husband escaped being killed) in the course of a home burglary in a nice, quiet, middle-class town.

Further to Steve's point, here's yesterday's article in the Times:

Neighbors of Home Invasion Victims Demand Stricter Repeat-Offender Laws
By CHRISTINE STUART
Published: August 16, 2007
CHESHIRE, Conn., Aug. 15 — Cheshire residents, angered by revelations that the men suspected of killing three members of a prominent family in a home invasion robbery last month had been paroled after convictions for burglary, rallied in a town park on Wednesday to demand stricter laws to keep repeat offenders behind bars.

Posted by Al | August 16, 2007 7:41 PM

With more resources you could switch that around to a much more effective system with less severe penalties but a higher cost of getting caught.

Don't you mean "higher likelihood of getting caught"?

"Less severe penalties" is pretty much equivalent to lower "cost of getting caught," isn't it?

Posted by Rieux | August 16, 2007 7:56 PM

What, Matt, no love for your former home?

H.O.P.E. For Reform: What a novel probation program in Hawaii might teach other states.

Angela Hawken and Mark Kleiman

The American Prospect

April 10, 2007

Probation would be a great alternative to incarceration -- if anyone knew how to get probationers to comply with probation rules. Now there's reason for hope. A novel program in Hawaii is demonstrating that it is possible to re-invent community supervision in a way that helps probationers toe the line, cuts recidivism, and curbs their flow to over-crowed jails and prisons. By closely monitoring probationer behavior and rapidly punishing violations with relatively mild sanctions -- typically a few days in jail -- the program provides much-needed structure to offenders whose lives are often in disarray.

Posted by Dan | August 16, 2007 8:03 PM

The decriminalize-drugs folks are kidding themselves. The problem is not that some drugs are criminalized but that there are lots of young males who want to be criminals. Read the chapter in Freakonomics on how little per hour drug dealers made during the peak of the crack boom. These guys could have made just as much per hour at McDonalds, and their death rate would have been a _lot_ lower. But they didn't want honest work, they wanted to be criminals. So, there is a vast supply of wanna-be criminals, which is why the wages of crime are so low.

If you legalized cocaine so that Apu could sell it at the KwikeeMart, then the guys who want to be criminals would go find something else criminal to do.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 16, 2007 8:11 PM

Read the chapter in Freakonomics on how little per hour drug dealers made during the peak of the crack boom. These guys could have made just as much per hour at McDonalds, and their death rate would have been a _lot_ lower. But they didn't want honest work, they wanted to be criminals.

What they wanted was a shot at what they believed they could get if they made it far enough up that ladder. That incentive didn't exist at McDonald's.

What Sailer wants, of course, is not to have a discussion on the merits, but to portray young black people as somehow inherently criminal.

Posted by crack | August 16, 2007 8:25 PM

Steve Sailer has a remarkably mean-spirited reading of the data. There are many people who are more prone than others to be criminals. It is as easy to herd them into non-criminal lives as manage them in the criminal justice system. We could constantly define as crimes behaviors that are undesirable, and thus sweep more people into jail.

Of course almost all the socially undesirable behaviors are much more common in men than women, and in the coming matriarchy if the women who are as mean as Steve take over, they will no doubt define some of Steve's habits as crimes.

My guess is that Steve is much less into jailing men for the sexual harassment of women than those who would do coke in the privacy of their own homes.

And the graph he linked to (at 7:21 PM) about the relationship between murder and imprisonment rates (taking it to be somewhat reflective of the actual rates despite the ordinate being labeled "fifties=100 for homicide and prison", whatever that's supposed to mean) shows nothing so much as an enormous drop in the murder rate with the end of prohibition. Right Steve?

Posted by epistemology | August 16, 2007 8:29 PM

Steve Sailer has a remarkably mean-spirited reading of the data. There are many people who are more prone than others to be criminals. It is as easy to herd them into non-criminal lives as manage them in the criminal justice system. We could constantly define as crimes behaviors that are undesirable, and thus sweep more people into jail.

Of course almost all the socially undesirable behaviors are much more common in men than women, and in the coming matriarchy if the women who are as mean as Steve take over, they will no doubt define some of Steve's habits as crimes.

My guess is that Steve is much less into jailing men for the sexual harassment of women than those who would do coke in the privacy of their own homes.

And the graph he linked to (at 7:21 PM) about the relationship between murder and imprisonment rates (taking it to be somewhat reflective of the actual rates despite the ordinate being labeled "fifties=100 for homicide and prison", whatever that's supposed to mean) shows nothing so much as an enormous drop in the murder rate with the end of prohibition. Right Steve?

Posted by epistemology | August 16, 2007 8:30 PM

And like Kevin Drum's been saying, a serious lead abatement program would help too.

Posted by low-tech cyclist | August 16, 2007 8:38 PM

Steve Sailer:
crack already made one of my points - some people do get rich off drugs, and they do it very publicly. That's attractive to people caught in a poverty cycle. The same phenomenon seems to occur with professional sports.

Also, even if drug dealing doesn't pay well, it pays better than most petty crime. If a wannabe criminal has a choice between a McDonalds job and drug dealing, they might choose drug dealing. But if they have to choose between McDonalds and starving, they may choose McDonalds.

In addition, your argument ignores the basic point that not all drug crime is drug dealing. Even if every drug dealer in America remained a criminal after decriminalization, there would still be more justice system resources available because of the elimination of possession offenses.

Posted by Leo | August 16, 2007 9:03 PM

Steve Sailer:
crack already made one of my points - some people do get rich off drugs, and they do it very publicly. That's attractive to people caught in a poverty cycle. The same phenomenon seems to occur with professional sports.

Also, even if drug dealing doesn't pay well, it pays better than most petty crime. If a wannabe criminal has a choice between a McDonalds job and drug dealing, they might choose drug dealing. But if they have to choose between McDonalds and starving, they may choose McDonalds.

In addition, your argument ignores the basic point that not all drug crime is drug dealing. Even if every drug dealer in America remained a criminal after decriminalization, there would still be more justice system resources available because of the elimination of possession offenses.

Posted by Leo | August 16, 2007 9:08 PM

Now, Matt's personal anti-crime program, following the home invasion he suffered, is to buy a gun.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 16, 2007 9:22 PM

Why not use the prison population as a slave labor force? I mean, just think how competitive the USA would be if prison slaves made our stuff. We could sell stuff abroad and help our balance of payments problem. And (icing on the cake) the proceeds could be used to reduce the deficit.

I am a genius.

Posted by kafka | August 16, 2007 9:23 PM

Possession offenses are to most people in prison what tax evasion was to Al Capone.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 16, 2007 9:24 PM

"If you legalized cocaine so that Apu could sell it at the KwikeeMart, then the guys who want to be criminals would go find something else criminal to do."

A really unserious argument...

OK - people are in prison because they're bad - the actual criminal activity is purely arbitrary, they simply do it because they want to break the law - any law.

I think that Prohibition would be a great chance to examine that thesis. Once alcohol was made illegal, lots of people started to illegally possess, consume and sell alcohol. If you assume that the total number of people committing criminal acts will remain constant, you would see a sharp drop in non-alcohol related crimes.
Then, when Prohibition was repealed, there would be a sharp increase of non-alcohol related crimes, as people transitioned from getting their evil on from alcohol to new criminal activity.

In 1986 illegal aliens were given amnesty - being converted from criminals into non-criminals with a stroke of the Gipper's pen. Thus, you would expect all of them to immediately transfer their criminal natures into a new criminal activity. Did all of those granted amnesty go on to become bank robbers, drug dealers and the like?

and so on.

Posted by justaguy | August 16, 2007 9:27 PM

The Italian-American Mafia, which grew under Prohibition, flourished for another 50-55 years afterwards, finally going into decline in the late 1980s.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 16, 2007 9:34 PM

I'm going as Omar Little for Hallowe'en.

Posted by Freddie | August 16, 2007 9:57 PM

Possession offenses are to most people in prison what tax evasion was to Al Capone.

This guy is nuts. Flat-out nuts.

Posted by Steve | August 16, 2007 10:16 PM

Mr. Steve "Troll" Sailer:

Offering criticism with no hint of an alternative is not being "constructive." It's at best concern trolling, at worst totally counterproductive. Since you obviously are enamored of the "jail 'em all and let God sort 'em out" approach, perhaps you could offer some reasons that approach will be more successful than initiatives that would reduce our swelling prison population? Barring that, could you kindly STFU?

Posted by James Hare | August 16, 2007 10:18 PM

"What they wanted was a shot at what they believed they could get if they made it far enough up that ladder. That incentive didn't exist at McDonald's."

A non-trivial number of McDonald's franchise owners started out as crew members; an entry-level McDonald's employee probably has a better shot at eventually becoming a franchise owner than becoming a drug kingpin.

"This guy is nuts. Flat-out nuts."

You are missing Sailer's point: possession charges are used to incarcerate criminals who are guilty of other crimes for which the necessary evidence is more difficult to obtain.

"Offering criticism with no hint of an alternative is not being "constructive.""

The alternative Sailer was hinting at was the status quo of keeping violent criminals in jail for long periods of time; it constructive of him to point out something that the whippersnapper Yglesias might not have known: that the "less jail" idea had been tried before, with disasterous results.

Posted by Fred | August 16, 2007 10:51 PM

It would be nice if Fred or Sailer or somebody would provide some evidence that harsher sentences caused the crime rate to drop. Correlation, causality, not the same, yadda yadda.

Posted by too many steves | August 16, 2007 11:13 PM

A non-trivial number of McDonald's franchise owners started out as crew members; an entry-level McDonald's employee probably has a better shot at eventually becoming a franchise owner than becoming a drug kingpin.

The issue isn't what the statistics say; it's what the people in question believe they might be able to get, and how those perceived incentives motivate their behavior. A McDonald's franchise owner does not have the perceived wealth, status (particularly sexually), or power of a high-level drug dealer. Those things, not criminality for its own sake (as Sailer claimed), are the incentives.

Posted by crack | August 16, 2007 11:14 PM

OK, but isn't the U.S. incareration rate, in either absolute numbers or as a proportion of the population, or both, the highest in the world? There are only two explanations for that:

1) Most people in U.S. prisons are criminals, or are trying to be criminals. The U.S. has more criminals in its population than any other country.

2) The U.S. puts alot of people in prison for victimless crimes, who really aren't criminals.

Either thesis you pick, this country isn't looking too good.

Posted by Ed | August 16, 2007 11:14 PM

First we must deal with the 900 pound gorilla in the room: A good portion of the jail cells are occupied by people who are there because they like the wrong recreational drug. People as innocent as their fellow tobacco and alcohol using compatriots.

No, the real 800-lb gorilla no one likes to talk about is different races and cultures committ crimes in dramatically different proportions. Ameican Asians have such a low crime rate that if the whole country was Asian, we could cut police by 2/3rds and prisons by 3/4ths. Whites in America have crime rates that track the same or better than Canadians and Euros except for homicide and other shooting incidents - which comes from whites wanting excessive firearms to help protect them from black thugs...

Blacks and the dysfuctional elements in black society results in blacks, 13% of population, committing 60% of the armed robberies, over half of stranger on stranger rapes, 56% of total murders, up to 70% of stranger-on-stranger murders.
Blacks who live societies that physically shun the underclass while paying lip service to ghetto culture not being the fault of such blacks - who proudly note no criminals in their families for 4-5 generations and well-educated ancestors and children in professional careers of course are outside that pathological culture and have lower crime rates. The Washington Post noted that 3 almost all-black middle class neighborhoods had a lower crime rate than adjacent middle-class white, black, imiigrant "mixed" neighborhoods.

Hispanics have a higher crime rate than whites, especially for petty crime, drug and alcohol offenses, but significantly less violent felonies than blacks, though certain violent Hispanic gangs have now equalled inner city blacks in use of violence.

The 800 -lb gorilla is what do you do with the problem of violence and crime in the black community that drives most US rates higher than other modern nations? many of the solutions are selective and focused on blacks in order to be effective - and feed Lefty and black hysteria
of "racism" anytime profiling, special schools for "at-risk blacks", taking away kids from dysfunctional single-parent black mothers is mentioned. Or things that smack of "Nazi eugenics" to Lefties,, such as encouraging policies aimed at certain families with every member a violent criminal over several generations not to breed another generation of murderers and thugs. (A deliberate "Roe effect" rather than the accidental one where dysfunctional inner-city women have abortions so as to not cramp their "party all the time" lifestyle.)
I agree with Sailor to a certain extent on the War on drugs - yes, it is damn convenient when you get 4 gang-bangers connected to a driveby shooting that killed one rival and wounded 3 bystanders in a "no black ever will snitch!" neighborhood have crack cocaine on them. That way you can use the drug laws like Capone and tax evasion to get the predators off the street. The problem is that the "war on drugs" allows ambitious prosecutors, DEA agents, FBI agents, cops to easily add to their headcount of "convictions" to promote their career enhancement by jailing people they know are no threat to others.

But an ability to socially engineer or reduce the numbers of criminal elements, notably dysfunctional black communities, offers a more lasting and cheaper solution than extravagent proposals like a cop on every street corner or warehousing the 7th child of a welfare mother to join 4 other siblings in 45,000 a year jail cells.
It is an uncomfortable debate, but a debate that America should have without activists attempting to shut it off. In a sense, we are now recognizing that diversity, multiculturalism and mixing criminal and non-criminal societies together only increases our pathologies. Jimmy Carter appears to be right that the best, safest neighborhoods are those of good people with a stable ethnic mix and slow assimilation of ehnic newcomers. Carter was crucified by the Left when he said it, but he seems to be having the last word with scholars. Which of course means that if good people don't let bad ones in, that the bad ones get concentrated and must be either isolated from harming good people, or aggressively socially engineered into becoming better people.

Posted by Chris Ford | August 16, 2007 11:43 PM

The statement that you do not have "parole" in the Federal system, while technically correct - they don't call it "parole", they call it "supervised release" - is in practice incorrect.

I was released in June, 2001, and kept on supervised release for five years, ending last year in June, 2006. In that time, I saw my "PO" roughly every six to eight weeks, with the time growing longer as the years went by and I did nothing to make suspicious.

Of course, every six to eight weeks meant that I could have stockpiled a nuclear arsenal without him knowing it. His searches of my room were desultory at best.

It doesn't matter, though, how many parole officers you create, there's no way they can watch someone 24x7x365. That's not going to work.

Period.

Second, the more cops you have on the beat, the more harassment the average non-white citizen is going to be subjected to - unless of course you have one hell of a community relations training program for these cops and you have considerably more success recruiting non-whites for the force than you do now.

Remember - most people become cops because they have a sociopathic need to put on a uniform and push people around. Weeding these goons out is your first and foremost requirement - hard to do when the people RUNNING law enforcement are sociopathic goons themselves.

When I saw the cops involved in that New York case where they sodomized the guy with a broom handle, I was like, "Where the hell did they find these guys? Rejects from the SS?" You could just look at those guys and immediately the word "goon squad" comes to mind.

You think that's going to change if somebody decides to put more money into cops on the street?

You have a certain level of crime in any society. You have more in THIS society because THIS society IS a criminal society. When it is obvious to any halfway observant person that most of the people running this country and getting rich in this country are criminals engaging in criminal enterprises - meaning not smoking a joint, but ripping other people off for BILLIONS, not mere hundreds or thousands like a bank robber (bank robbers make an average of something like $6,000 per job and would make more over time working at McDonalds) - and when anybody who is non-white can see that they aren't ever going to be treated equally by these white assholes running the country, why is it a surprise that there is more crime here than elsewhere?

Add in the "melting pot" issues of racial divisiveness even betwee non-whites and the utter failure of the educational system in this country, leading to scores of thousands of youth gang members, and it just gets worse.

The idea Matt is considering is a bandaid on a terminal cancel patient.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 17, 2007 12:23 AM

The chief reason liberals are trying to switch brand names to "progressives" is because when liberals were running things in the 1960s they messed up the criminal justice and welfare systems, which helped unleash a historic crime wave, for which voters have never forgiven liberals.

If you don't want to make "progressive" as much of a boat anchor as "liberal" has become with voters, you _really_ need to study the history of how liberals screwed up in the 1960s. May I recommend "The Unraveling of America" by historian Allan Matusow? It would do you youngsters a world of good.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 1:55 AM

Add this approach with the Japanese incarceration procedures and we might have a chance at real reform. The idea is to make prison a place you really don't want to go to. And I don't mean because of the threat of assault, sexual or other.
Even the most hardened criminal in the US prison system would realize something was different if he found himself in a Japanese prison. He would not be allowed to sit down until he had earned that right by proving his ability to observe the rules and hard work. In a similar fashion, he must sleep on a hard stone slab until he earns a pillow, then a blanket, then a mattress. He must wake when told to, sleep when told to, work when told to. He must ask permission to talk. There is no TV. He may earn a book after a long while of good behavior. The guards are not harsh, they are firm. They are professionals.
Can you see something like this in America?

Posted by patricktherogue | August 17, 2007 3:00 AM

The idea Matt is considering is a bandaid on a terminal cancel patient.

I'm just going to pull out this one quote here, but there are many I could. This quote--and its author, and Fred, and Steve Sailer-- imply that there is a crime epidemic in this country. That is, of course, entirely incorrect, and is refuted by every piece of statistical evidence.

Posted by Freddie | August 17, 2007 6:52 AM

Freddie,

"I'm just going to pull out this one quote here, but there are many I could."

Don't put Richard Steven Hack's words in my mouth. This is apparently an ex-con who has crack-pipe ideas about transhumanism. I never said there was a "crime epidemic" here.

patricktherogue,

"Add this approach with the Japanese incarceration procedures and we might have a chance at real reform."

Great idea: all we need is a few hundred thousand Japanese corrections officers. Have you ever met a corrections officer? I knew a few in my Army Reserve unit -- they were the ones who couldn't get the cop jobs. Decent, salt-of-the-earth guys, generally, but not the sort to easily embrace Japanese cultural traits.

Posted by Fred | August 17, 2007 7:12 AM

If it weren't drug charges, the government would just use something else to imprison young men leading chaotic lives.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/01/sb-six-questio-1169218595

Posted by beowulf | August 17, 2007 9:59 AM

Just to correct the record, I never said there was a crime epidemic either. I said there was more crime here than elsewhere - with several million US citizens in the joint, and our per capita stats at number one, I think that makes it pretty obvious that the statement is factually correct.

But that doesn't really mean we have more CRIMINALS here - it just means we have more LAW here. And the purpose of law is to create criminals.

What there is here is a lot of people becoming criminals who find it hard to do anything else because they are being systematically discriminated against and virtually LOOTED by the corporations and politicians in this country.

Getting more parole officers isn't going to help that. That's what I mean by a bandaid approach.

And, Fred, you have far more mouth wrapped around a crack-pipe than I ever have. Can you say you've never drunk alcohol, smoked pot, or tried cocaine?

I didn't think so. I can. My only vices are Haagen-Daaz ice cream, ham salad sandwiches and pizza with five meat toppings.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 17, 2007 9:55 PM

"our per capita stats at number one"

Number one, really? Even higher than South Africa?

"Can you say you've never drunk alcohol, smoked pot, or tried cocaine?"

No; yes; barely.

"My only vices are Haagen-Daaz ice cream, ham salad sandwiches and pizza with five meat toppings."

You have horrible taste in food. Try Maggie Moo's Cool Mint ice cream sometime.

Posted by Fred | August 17, 2007 10:43 PM

Nothing in particular to contribute, but a very interesting discussion.

Posted by Pachacutec | August 18, 2007 10:33 AM

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Posted by wilzy jcxu | August 27, 2007 12:32 PM