In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died. https://t.co/fR6XfiN9uE
— CTV News (@CTVNews) November 13, 2023
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.”
The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder.
I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say.
MURDER MURDER MURDER
This is what the bombers did
to a human being
MURDER MURDER MURDER
“Has died” rather than “was murdered by the forces of Islam”.
The Canadian media, including the privately owned media, is subsidised by the despicable regime of Justin Trudeau, but, I suspect, that even if he did not subsidise them – they would continue to behave in this terrible way. And it is not just Canada.
The long death of the West continues.
In response to that CTV howler, these sorts of things are popping up.
“President John F. Kennedy, who rode in a motorcade in Dallas, has died.”
“President Abraham Lincoln, who enjoyed a play at the Ford Theater last night, has died.”
“Daniel Pearl, who was visiting Pakistan, has died.”
“Sharon Tate, who attended a California party, has died.”
CBC is bad enough but CTV is its mentally challenged institutionalized sibling.
If they told the truth? Then, their positions would be untenable.
Hamas dare not broadcast any of the truth here in the West; that’s why their flying monkey minions are tearing down all the posters.
What they need to do next is post all the victims, in full bloody horror, for the public to see so that they will know what their heroes do. Hamas is like the Nazi Einsatzkommando, and deserves the fate the Nazis should have gotten, which was to be run through the same death camps.
Honestly, that’s precisely what the Allies should have done. Forget Nuremberg; merely apply their own techniques and technologies to them in turn. Every card-carrying member of the Nazi party should have been sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka, to be “processed” just like their victims were. They all profited; they should have all been dealt with in exactly the same manner.
All that touchy-feely BS about “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind…” is false. The real deal is, if you don’t exact just punishment for taking human life, you’re creating and enabling monsters. Look at all the escalation you see with recidivist criminals here in the US, when they get “mercy” from the courts and legal system… How many innocents have been murdered by men and women who should, deservedly, been properly punished or simply put down like the animals they demonstrated themselves to be? You take a life without justification? Yours needs to be taken, in turn. Anything else is utterly contemptuous of the human lives taken by the criminal, the terrorist, or whoever else dares violate the sanctity of human life without just cause.
Honestly, half of why we have Hamas? It’s because all these weak sisters have been unable to bring themselves to deliver just retribution and preventive action. You spare the criminal, excuse them? You get more and more, worse and worse crimes. With the historical example of every Nazi going to the gas chambers they built? I’m fairly certain that a bunch of people would have looked at that and decided that perhaps the path of wisdom was not to emulate them. Not all, of course, but maybe enough…
I suppose we could also point to the “went missing” bit as if she was responsible for her “missing” status.
The injunction of an eye for an eye etc. was meant to be a restraint and a guide for the law. In other words, punishment should not be disproportionately harsh (for example the death penalty for stealing a loaf of bread) nor unduly lenient.
In other words, if someone causes an injury, then they should suffer a similar injury, neither more or less than the original victim.
Of course in our oh-so-enlightened society and “justice” system, the rights of the criminals are paramount.
In civil law – suing someone for damages – this is the norm.
But I think that, in criminal law, proportionality is wrong. The punishment ought to be somewhat more serious than the harm caused.
Civil law concerns torts – wrongful acts that do not rise to the level of what we call criminal. Exact compensation is good for that. Criminal law deals with acts that society considers more serious, more harmful, more deserving of prohibition and punishment. We oughtn’t let a criminal decide he can hurt someone “this much” so long as he is willing to suffer that same amount of harm. He should have to suffer more than the harm he has caused.
It should never be an equal trade.
In the end, the entire structure of “law” as viewed mechanistically from the standpoint of “what does it do for society” and “what is its function” boils down to behavioral modification.
You can’t bring someone back to life, after they’ve been murdered. What you can do, however, is set a clear marker that taking a life is intolerable, and use that as a training cue for others, in order that their behavior may be moderated and controlled. You’re not so much “getting revenge” and “exacting justice”, you’re taking an opportunity to evaluate the behavior of the criminal and ensuring that he won’t commit another like crime, ever. You’re also demonstrating the value of innocent life to others that may be thinking about emulating said criminal.
As such, I question the value of both not executing proven murderers and other violent criminals, and of doing it in private. It ought to be seen, it ought to be treated with the due respect it is due for the gravity of the occasion. The old days sometimes saw circus-like atmospheres for such things, and that is clearly wrong. You shouldn’t be able to get away with murder or other violent crime against others, but at the same time, when they put you down, you don’t do it with malice or celebration. If anything, they ought to mourn the loss of both the lives of the murderer and the victim.
One of the things I’ve always found maddening about much of the current “legalist” environment surrounding violent crime is how casually they treat it all. It’s as if they discount, utterly, the damage done to the lives of the victims, which cheapens every other life surrounding that life, including that of the murderer.
Look at the way they phrase the news about that professor asshole that killed the Jewish protestor… That guy had zero respect for life, and why did he have it? Why did he think so little of what he was doing, striking that elderly Jewish man down? Because the system encourages that thought-pattern… If you knew that you’d hang for killing someone by accident, in circumstances like that? You’d think twice about hitting them; the way they excuse that crap like “Well, he didn’t intend to kill the man…” when they come to trial for it all is mind-boggling. Raw fact? He hit the man over the head with a megaphone, knocked him to the ground, and that was where he hit his head hard enough to kill him. Foreseeable sequence of events… “Intent” means nothing; he committed the act, and because he was excused due to a “lack of intent”, then others will take such acts in the future as being similarly “without intent”.
Magic words don’t excuse your actions, and should not. Did he act? Did his victim die from that act? That’s all we need to know; all else is making excuses for violent behavior that should be culled from the body politic.
@bobby b
It should never be an equal trade.
So if, for example, a criminal tortures, rapes and murders some woman, should the state find some way to up the ante on that? Not sure how to do that exactly.
Though, in fairness, if you send some guy to a maximum security prison unless he is a gangbanger he is likely to get non judicial punishment including constant violence, rape, torture and, quite potentially murder. Something I find pretty shocking. Police seem to use the threat of the severe non judicial consequences of prison to intimidate people all the time — and many people seem to relish this “prison justice”. Me? I think if the people want that they should have to balls to enact that into statue rather than delegating it to the caprice of the very worst people in our society.
I don’t really know the answer, and my bloodlust is just as strong to take ’em out back and beat the crap out of them. Nonetheless, countries like Norway and the Netherlands have much less brutal prison regimes and seem to have very much lower recidivism rates. Seems to me that this should be one of the most important goals of judicial punishment. Which isn’t to say deterrence and vengeance have no place.
TBH, I am a little in shock right now with what is going on in the criminal justice system. It seems a series of cases going on, Trump for example, Chauvin — and perhaps even more so the cops who were with Chauvin, Douglass Mackey, the Jan 6th protesters and of course we just passed Aaron Schwartz day. While at the same time the most blatant criminality is going on all around us and goes unpunished. Maybe the gross inequities and deep unfairness of the criminal justice system is just made more apparent by huge visibility in social media, but it seems to me to be getting much, much worse. I’m no criminal, but I know that if they wanted to get me they could utterly destroy me — and that is terrifying in America of all places.
Every time I hear about one of those horrible school shootings what rings in my mind is “fifteen dead kids at that school, how dreadful, in Chicago we call that ‘the weekend'”.
The system is being crashed, deliberately. You really can’t come up with any other explanation for the Soros prosecutor program; the parties behind that have to know what the effects will be, given that there are so many examples of what those policies actually bring into being.
Of course, it might be that they really believe what they say they do, in which case they’re going to find out the hard way why things were the way they were… Good luck with it all, when the vigilantes on both sides are lynching their supposed criminal victims. I am not seeing any of this work out well, at all.
@Paul Marks “The long death of the West continues.”
I am at the odd point where I’m thinking the best thing we can do is go hard left and push what’s left of western civ off the cliff so something else can start.
Yeah, it’s definitely an inexact science. How many apples equals one hurricane?
We let the civil justice system worry about proportionality – your car is wrecked and you are hurt in an accident, you carefully itemize all damages and bills (and assign reasonable amounts to pain, etc.) and you make the negligent driver pay exactly that much back.
But criminal law isn’t compensating anyone for the crime – it’s exacting a toll on the caught-and-convicted criminal, for payment, for retribution, and pour encourager les autres. Too many times, people want to match the penalty to the crime – “if you beat Joe up, what’s a reasonable amount of jail time to pay for it?” I think we need to take that resulting (vague, average) number, and multiply it by some factor greater than 1. Otherwise, when combined with the statistical chance of arrest and conviction, we’re not un-incenting crime – we’re just charging the reasonable price for it. We need to make it a very bad trade.
For now. But . . . The Scandinavian countries have always had a homogeneous culture – similar people, all having a cultural affinity for one another, a sense of community, shared trad values . . . They’ve also always lacked a poor under-culture. But now, they’ve admitted a critical mass of immigrants from places that do NOT share anything like a Scandy culture. They’ve willingly built their own large underclass culture that comes pre-hating the Scandies. Look at Scandinavian crime stats in ten years and get back to me. They’re already (in Norway and Sweden) talking about a need for many more jail beds.
Point is, they’ve joined us in building an overall culture of mistrust, victimology, and very separate and hostile close-by societies in perpetual conflict. I’d guess all of the countries which tried huge immigration this decade will be building prisons during the next decade.
Are we over-punishing crime? When we write legislation defining a crime and setting a punishment for violation, we are supposedly enacting our social morals. No raping, killing, beating, stealing.
If a ton of people from one cultural subset repeatedly and predictably violate that law, does that mean we should make their conduct legal? That we should stop punishing it? To me, it means that we’re not exacting a heavy enough penalty to persuade them to do something else.
Unless you have a very safe society in which no one is raping and killing and stealing, I think the “we’re punishing too many people for crimes” outlook is wrong. Either we decide that once-criminal conduct is now acceptable and stop arresting and prosecuting the actors, or we hold fast to those moral expressions and make “the people” live up to it.
If we really don’t like murder, it’s stupid to discuss prosecuting and imprisoning fewer murderers because the numbers are up. That onus goes on the murderers.
(And, yeah, some prisons are hell. County jails (for misdemeanors) are not too bad. Drunks and druggies and thieves. State prisons (where you go for state-law felonies) are awful. Gangs and whackos. Fed prisons are mostly not too bad. I’ve had clients who, knowing they were going down, admitted to jurisdictional elements that put their crimes into federal jurisdiction just so they could get out of going to the MN state prison at Bayport. You tend to get more time in the fed system, but your chances of getting Weird Bubba or Tyrone the Enforcer as a cellmate are lower. But the fact that prison can be hellish is a function of how much money we’re willing to pay to support that system. We can’t even decide to put more money into roads – we’re not going to get a groundswell going to pay more for nicer prisons.)
Me too, but I don’t see it as being with the CJS itself. The problem is that we allowed progressives to turn that system into an enforcement mechanism for their own personal religions. The DOJ – and specifically its cop arm the FBI – were invaded and overrun just like our military was, with people set in charge not based on criminal or legal expertise, but through political favoritism. Now, our military can’t fight wars, and our crim justice system doesn’t fight crime. But they do get their pronouns right.
If I were criminally-bent, I’d argue that we’re too prison-happy. But that argument should only work once we decide that we don’t really need to prohibit murder and rape and theft. If we start limiting imprisonment without affirmatively deciding to legalize heinous conduct, we’re fooling ourselves. If you want to limit murder, you cannot decide to not heavily punish murderers, even if your stats look high.
Used to have my “regular” set of rooms at the Palmer House for trials in Chicago fedcourt. Concierge knew my name. Loved going there. Wouldn’t go back now. But then, I suppose we’re catching up quickly here in Mn.
(OT, but here’s a cool new documentary for anyone interested in how the George Floyd mess went down. Some here had an interest in this earlier.
https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html )
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-67306896
Here’s the bbc, albeit in a slightly unusual context.
An ice hockey player who died after his neck was fatally cut during a match was identified by his partner, an inquest has heard.
For those who are unaware of this event the ice hockey player had his neck fatally slashed during a game by an opponents skate blade. Both were North Americans playing in the English league. To add further discomfort to the reporting the deceased was white while the opponent is black.
I do not claim to be an expert on the sport although I have watched it for decades. I have never seen an attempted check (<99% of the time body to body) where the leg and skate have been raised to that angle. It has been said that a minor collision with a 3rd player prior to the fatal impact led to a major loss of balance. As I said I’m no expert but there is plenty of videos evidence on YouTube and I’m not buying it.
I was surprised to read that “a man” had subsequently been stated for suspected manslaughter and was in the custody of South Yorkshire Police.
The case, should it ever come to trial, will be interesting. Negligence is no excuse for, say, death by dangerous driving snd this appears to be dangerous skating. However for the purpose of this post I merely highlight the initial passive bbc headline “An ice hockey player who died” in the light of with what should have been patently obvious at the time.
Incidentally there is further footage which allegedly shows the crowd at a subsequent game cheering and applauding when a picture of the attacker, not the victim, was shown on the big screen. This both puzzles and perturbs me greatly.
Fred Z. – the position you describe has a name “accelerationism”, the idea is that the death of civilisation is inevitable so we might as well have the victory of the left (of the left hand path that leads to Hell) NOW – why prolong the death agony of the West? Why not actually help the left tear down what is left of civilisation – in the hope that something new can be created?
I do NOT agree with this position, but I understand the despair that leads to it.
By the way, I notice that there is some talk of “Hamas” in the comment thread – the one good thing about the mass marches in so many Western cities is that they show we are NOT facing just a specific group, this is the mainstream of the Islamic community in a bizarre alliance with “Woke” Marxists (who are atheists) in the West.
This is not a “knowledge problem” the marchers in so many Western cities know very well what happened in the mass attack of October 7th – and when they chant about the “genocide” of Muslims they know (they know very well) that the Muslim population of this area, “between the river and the sea”, goes UP (not down) every year – not only do they know this (and the changing demography in many Western nations) they are counting on it.
They really chant about “genocide” not because they fear it is being done to them – but because they plan to, eventually, do this to others – and not just to the millions of Jews “between the river and the sea”, yes the marchers would welcome the deaths of these millions of human beings, especially if they died agonising and degrading deaths, but the ambition of the marchers in so many Western cities is much broader than Israel.
Telling people what they already know is not going to change their behaviour – the marchers (Muslim and NON Muslim) in so many Western cities have made a voluntary (free) choice knowing the facts, they have made a choice to support evil – knowing very well what it is. To shut our eyes to this is folly.
As has been pointed out so many times – the true threat to the West is NOT from Muslims or Marxists, it is from the internal decay of the West, the loss of faith in the basic principles of Western Civilisation, the foes of the West sense this weakness, this decay.
Applying Paul’s observation to my example the apparent fact that at a subsequent event much of the crowd was applauding, even if as a misplaced exhibition of completely inappropriate sympathy, the image of the perpetrator of a fatal assault cannot be seen as anything other than moral decay.
Admittedly nowhere near the same level of depravity as the scum who exulted in the 7th October massacre but not completely dissimilar in its self-regarding support of the wrong side.
Also what the hell was the team/stadium/rink thinking when they decided to show this image on the screen? Another bloody “don’t look back in anger” moment?
Returning to the main subject I will share the fact that this evening male friends and acquaintances will once again be taking part in a security patrol around their shul (in a town I will not identify but it is to the north of the M25 and has a diverse population) as they no longer trust the police to intervene in a timely fashion, if at all, if called upon.
Having done my share of training around how to use discipline to modify behavior (from a workplace safety standpoint, what we used to call behavior and consequences) the problem with severity of punishment as a motivating tool is that it is pretty much the weakest lever you have. For starters, negative consequences impact behavior less than positive ones. And beyond that, FAR more important are certainty and immediacy – that is if you want to stop an unwanted behavior the consequences need to be as certain as possible and as close in time to the behavior as possible (and you will note that for most criminal behavior the the positive, for the criminal, consequences tend to be both immediate and fairly certain, which does mean that negative consequences MUST be more costly).
Applying these concepts to the criminal justice system and you will immediately notice how much of a disaster policies like no cash bail are when combined with a sclerotic court system. To take one example – the kids who deliberately struck and killed a cyclist when out joyriding in a stolen car were shocked to find out (after posting video of their actions) that they weren’t going to be sent home after their arraignment hearing. They had already displayed a clear preference for the immediate dopamine hit for murdering someone and bragging about it over the risk of a trial in couple of years followed by some time in jail, but you do get the sense that if their experience had informed them that their actions were going to lead to them being in jail in a few days they might have actually thought twice about it.
Criminality already tends to appeal to people with poor impulse control, a short time horizon and a tendency to downplay risk. This is why broken windows policing works. The same person who is willing to kill someone for the fun of it is also going to commit any number of lesser offenses for the same reason. Failing to administer consequences for the lesser offenses diminishes the impact of any potential sanction, no matter how severe, for greater offenses. This is why respect for the law in society is vital, and effective policing far more important than criminal sentencing. Even capital punishment is an ineffective deterrent when local police are only managing to get to the point of an arrest in 20% of murders.
If you really want to cut reduce crime you are better off with less severe punishments inflicted quickly and with high certainty. This also has an additional social benefit that those unjustly punished suffer less harm, so that a higher error rate (almost inevitable when you are pushing for swift consequences) is can be more readily ameliorated with compensation. You will still need more severe punishments for the complete incorrigible but simply pushing for more severe sentences has the negative consequence (as we’ve seen in practice) of demanding of the justice system a much lower error rate, which makes the consequence both less likely to be administered to the offender and delays it, to the point where in most states in the US that have the death penalty on the books rarely administer it, and when it is is often a decade or more after the offense.
Very insightful and interesting comments from both BobbyB and phwest. People like that are why I come back here.
@Bobby I saw some clips of that new documentary on Chauvin, TBH I don’t think I can watch the whole thing. It is just too horrifying. It has often struck me that if Chauvin ever was able to get a new trial then they’d deal with it by putting him in gen-pop, when the problem would be gone forever.
Regarding money being the problem in prison — that may well be, and perhaps the problem can’t be fixed, but at least the justice system should be a little contrite, embarrassed or ashamed by it, rather than promoting it as a useful aspect of the system. And perhaps we should speak out when people relish “prison justice” as if it is a good thing.
@phwest I find your points very persuasive. I wonder if you can comment on this dilemma though. For crimes to be more readily solved the police need access to more information. Yet we, civil libertarians, are deeply concerned with the growing intrusiveness of the government into our daily lives. How do you address this?
And to both, I think an important aspect of this is non crimes. For sure we don’t want to go soft on murderers, but perhaps we do want to go soft on bookkeeping errors (Trump), speaking in a way that the government doesn’t like (Mackey), trespassing (a thousand Jan 6th protesters), or dope dealers (a significant portion of the prison population.) Perhaps if we didn’t fill the prisons up with people convicted of insignificant crimes with 100 year prison sentences, we might be able to find a bed for that rapist, murderer or batterer.
phwest : You will still need more severe punishments for the complete incorrigible but simply pushing for more severe sentences has the negative consequence (as we’ve seen in practice) of demanding of the justice system a much lower error rate, which makes the consequence both less likely to be administered to the offender and delays it, to the point where in most states in the US that have the death penalty on the books rarely administer it, and when it is is often a decade or more after the offense.
If severe = death, then this makes sense. But if severe = lots of jail time, then not so much. In the first place a long jail sentence can always be interrupted by a rehearing if evidence comes to light that the conviction was dodgy. And the primary benefit to the community of a long jail sentence is not the warm glow of retribution, or a sense of justice, or supposed deterrence, but incapacitation. The perp is, while in jail, both restricted as to his opportunities for further offending, and more likely to be caught if he reoffends.
Prison is good for keeping the incorrigible from their neighbors throats. Deterrence becomes less important if a large fraction of the bad guys are already inside.
@Lee Moore
If severe = death, then this makes sense. But if severe = lots of jail time, then not so much.
I’m a big fan of Law and Order the TV show, however, something that I always found curious were those cases where McCoy offers to take the death penalty off the table if he’ll rat on his accomplice. I have no idea if that is actually what happens in these situations but it always struck me as far from self evidently true that the death penalty is more severe than life without parole. Would you rather slip into blissful nothingness or spend the next forty years in constant fear of your life, surrounded by the most horrifying people in the world, never knowing when a shank is coming your way? Never knowing when a gang is going to trap you in a corner and do terrible things to you? And what have you to look forward to? Can you imagine old age in prison with its dreadful health facilities? What is it like to go through chemotherapy in prison, or Parkinson’s, or urinary incontinence? And what do you have to try to scrape out some enjoyment out of that dreadful life? Lifting weights with the brothers in the yard? Or maybe 23 hours lockdown a day, with barely access to even books or writing materials.
Of course different people value these things differently, and maybe the vague almost impossible hope that your conviction would be overturned (what is that, one in a million?) is enough to make life worth living. But it is not self evident to me that death isn’t superior to a life of hell with no hope of redemption.
Oh and one other thing — one big downside of increasing the certainty of being prosecuted for a crime is that it takes a lot of power away from powerful people. If you have, for example, 20% of all tax frauds prosecuted, it means that the IRS can choose WHICH 20% to prosecute, which gives them terrifying power. If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime, you might say. But the problem is that the statute books and the books of regulations are so vast it is almost impossible to go through life without committing some sort of crime or violation.
To give two examples: Trump is being prosecuted for misstating the valuation of his real property, despite the fact that pretty much all real estate owners do this all the time. The fact that normal practice is a crime just means that they can use this to pick and chose who to persecute. Or Douglass Mackey who has been convicted for the unbelievably vague and broad “conspiracy against rights” for posting a meme encouraging people to text their votes for Hillary. “Conspiracy against rights” surely happens all the time all over the place since it is so unbelievably broad and vague. But it lets them go after the guy who insulted the big kahuna with political power.
So low conviction rates are something that give a lot of power to the police, the DA and politicians in general.
phwest said:
I’ve had some slight experience in that same arena, that of workplace safety. I have to both agree and disagree with what you say here…
To say that the draconian punishments for egregiously unsafe or antisocial behavior tends to miss the mark of what’s going on, a lot of the time is absolute truth. The draconian stuff generally stays out there in the haze of “potential”, because the idiots running things never, ever want to be the bad guy and actually impose said punishments, even when obviously deserved.
This reduces the value of said draconian punishments, and at the same time, reduces everyone else’s obedience to the rules because they never see them enforced… Which leads them to disrespect all of them, no matter how much common sense those rules represent.
What a lot of people miss is that you’re playing to the crowd with these things, not the individual. Have a rule that’s never enforced? All of them become similarly unworthy of respect, by everyone.
I’m really not a fan of the “casual draconian”. You make the punishment too big to be implemented practically, then you wind up basically destroying the whole system eventually. On the other hand, if you don’t have people looking over at Bob, who got fired because he left loose trash out on the flight line, then it isn’t long before they cease taking any of the rules seriously.
My take on these things is that there should be proportion in all things, except those that you can’t allow any tolerance for. You do something that results in death? Yeah… That’s due a draconian response. You litter up the quad? Maybe that’s due a punishment, but not the sort of thing where you’re essentially getting the equivalent of capital punishment for a misdemeanor.
That was one of the errors of the old UK justice system, back when they had “theft of bread” down as a capital offense. Nobody wanted to enforce it, so they oftentimes didn’t. Transportation to the Colonies was often the punishment imposed, or something not-quite-capital.
As I’ve said, the whole point of such a system is behavioral modification. You have to calibrate these things carefully, and just like with training animals, you have to be consistent and fair. The current legal system is neither thing, and that’s tearing respect for it down. You observe all the “pro-Gaza” riots here in the US, and note that none, absolutely none of the protestors are being arrested or prosecuted, and then compare that with the supposed January 6th “Insurrection”? Yeah. That’s only going to accrue to the benefit of law-and-order… (sarcasm, there…)
You absolutely should have severe punishments in place for some transgressions, but you must apply those punishments when they are absolutely and undeniably earned. Either that, or don’t have them on the books, because the minute you choose not to enforce those rules and not implement those punishments? You’re on the road to ruin, with regards to your disciplinary system.
I’m not a fan of the whole regime of negative reinforcement. The problem you run into with that is that you’re never reinforcing the things you want society to be doing; hardly anyone ever pauses to think about the fact that you almost always get ticketed for speeding or doing something stupid in your car, but you never, ever get pulled over and praised for driving carefully and responsibly. Not that you’d like that, but… You get the point.
We’ve got this entire paradigm set up to where it’s all negative reinforcement, and that just doesn’t work over the long haul. I used to have a situation where I was assigned, in that the unit was constantly getting dinged for having a messy trash point, so we’d always be getting these calls on the weekend to go drag people out and clean it up. Every Friday, we’d clean it up and prep it, by Sunday morning, it’d be trashed again. Nobody in charge ever bothered to ask why or investigate what was going on, it was just an accepted “fact of life”. Got in a new commander; he got one call, one weekend shortly after he took command, and that was it: He fixed it. Permanently. What did he do? He went out and looked, noted that all the trash was coming from units using the adjacent training area over the weekend, and he made one call to the responsible parties, had all the dumpsters moved into the inside of our motor pool fence, where people couldn’t get at them, and that was it. Never happened again. Previous year or two that I’d been there, the situation had been a constant ulcer of people having their asses chewed for things they weren’t responsible for doing, and having to come in off-duty and clean up other people’s messes.
You want to modify behavior, which is what any rule system is really doing, you have to go out and analyze why people are doing what you don’t want them doing, and then you modify the environment around them to change their behavior. You don’t just publish another rule threatening draconian punishment; that’s futile. Fix the behavior by fixing the things encouraging them to do those things you don’t like. If that doesn’t work, then you have to progress to other steps. Nine times out of ten, simple mods to the environment will solve most of your problems.
Some things, however, like violence? Those you don’t tolerate, and you enforce your draconian rules against that with vigor and utter intolerance for the behavior, for what you excuse today, you’ll have far more of tomorrow.
Something I meant to say above is that one of the things you absolutely have to do is have certainty of punishment/reward for minor things. You get these ultra-violent monsters out there on the streets because there was never any previous curb on their behavior that effectively put a punctuation point on “Don’t do that” for them.
You spare the rod, spoil the child. Further implication is that you’ll later have to hang said child because you never dealt with their earlier bad behavior, which fact leads into their never having curbed it.
Reward/punishment ought to be in keeping with the behavior in question, and consistently applied from the earliest age.
The two little thugs that ran over the retired police chief in their stolen car? They did that, and got the way they did, because of “mercy” applied to them earlier in life. They genuinely did not believe they could or would be punished for their acts… Until now, when they’ve killed a man, and face a lengthy stay behind bars. They actually ought to be executed, because I don’t see them ever achieving anything positive in life. This case represents the true “wages of mercy” meted out by our too-lenient “justice” system. Had these two little ass-clowns been caught, and dealt with earlier? They’d still be free, and that old retired cop would still be alive. Because someone thought they shouldn’t be punished…? Here we are.
Over the long haul? It would have been more merciful for them to have been flogged or something like what Singapore does, back when they first offended. Might still have done this, but… They’d certainly not have the expectation of being right back on the street the way they did.
Fraser:
Let me point out — without gloating, i swear! — that i made pretty much the same point arguing against you in a previous thread.
Snorri Godhi said:
It’s not so much the conviction rates, because those are in the hands of the juries as well as the judiciary, but the prosecution rates… And, the things they do surrounding the plea bargains they make. Way, way too much of this crap is up to the prosecutor’s office, and thus subject to politicization. The fact that the so-called “Soros Prosecutor” is a thing is a marker for what is going wrong here in the US.
My family is currently involved in the periphery of what should be a capital case for drunk-driving, resulting in the death of a young woman. The vision you get into the system’s process? Yeesh. I can easily see a lot of people saying “F*ck this… We ain’t never getting justice for our dead… I wonder who I could hire to deal with this… Or, maybe I could do it myself?”
Again, the functional point of a system like what we call our “justice system” isn’t “Justice”; it’s modifying behavior such that the rest of society will tolerate what the various criminal actors are doing. You cease effectively modifying that behavior, at any level? Don’t expect the “rest of society” to stand by mute, watching what goes on. They’ll nod along with the “system”, and then find something else, whether it’s listening to some demagogue arguing for the draconian, or seeking a private justice. Either way, you’re breaking the current system, and you’re really not providing anything other than a future of vigilante and extreme action.
It takes decades, generations even, for this stuff to work out, but we’re paying the price right now for all those years of indulgent leniency in our cities. The things that have manifested in recent years only began because a bunch of touchy-feely types couldn’t foresee the end-state of effective decriminalization.
The resultant mess is going to lead to an era of excess the likes of which they only had nightmares about. It’s ironic that these do-goodniks have ushered in the very dystopia they always projected, bringing it into being not through the excesses of the “carceral state” but through their well-intentioned subversion of that deluded concept of theirs.
@Snorri Godhi
Let me point out — without gloating, i swear! — that i made pretty much the same point arguing against you in a previous thread.
Sorry, I lost track of that thread. Nonetheless, I’m not really sure how you were arguing against me. For sure, if you are going to have hate speech laws it would be nice if they were enforced without discrimination, but they won’t be, so that is one of the many reasons why having hate speech laws is a very bad idea.
And, FWIW, I don’t think it is gloating at all to point out my many inconsistencies in thought. I’m a bit of a scatterbrain, so I appreciate your helping me consolidate when necessary. (It’s probably all those nut oils I’m eating, right? 😉)
@phwest:
Agree partially. Swift and sure is as, or even more important than, severe. I’m still in favor of severe over lenient, though. Without that, it almost becomes a contractual bargain: I will rape this person, or carjack you, in exchange for this proportional punishment. Too many already accept such a bargain now. It needs to be a very bad bargain.
Shift the paradigm from “justice” to “behavioral modification”, and you might start to see better results. Justice is an abstract; corrective training is a concrete and essentially unassailable point you can’t argue over.
As well, it works better down the line: “This is your third carjacking that you’ve been charged with and convicted for… None of the earlier attempts at correcting your behavior worked, so it is obvious you are untrainable. Standard correctives have not worked; you’re going away for life…”
If nothing else, it puts the onus for repeat offenses onto the criminal for failing to respond to corrective training.
I’m not suggesting that the Ludovico Technique from “A Clockwork Orange” be developed or applied, but that the carceral process begins looking at the things it does as “behavioral modification” opportunities rather than “punishment”. Running our prisons as these free-floating criminal colonies where rape and violence happens routinely ain’t any more “just” than the original crime was, so we need to recast these things not as “paying back society” so much as “Yeah, don’t do that again…”
My own take on the prison system is that it has, as currently conceived, shown itself to be utterly ineffective in terms of what it is supposed to be doing, which is shaping the criminal’s behavior so as to reduce their impact on society. When you get out of jail with “street cred”, maybe we’re doing it wrong. How do you go about making being criminal be embarrassing and something you’re ashamed of, for these cretins? Like those two kids that ran over the retired cop in Las Vegas; what would make them objects of ridicule and shame, rather than notoriety and fame? The ideal should be to discourage and reform the criminal, rather than glorify them. Which we’ve got a really bad habit of doing here in the US… All the way back to the highwaymen of Ye Olde Englande.
If you analyze the “criminal justice system” as a Skinner Box, what the hell are the actual behaviors we’re rewarding with it, and what are the perverse incentives all along the line for all participants? If you go into it and look around with open eyes from the standpoint of figuring out why everyone is doing what they are, then a lot of contradictions just leap out at you.
The whole thing reminds me of the epiphany I had in the Army, late in my career: We want people to be fit and well-conditioned, yes? So… Why do we use physical training stuff as a punishment? “Drop and give me 20…” isn’t just a stereotype; we did that routinely, especially in early training. So… What were we really reinforcing? That physical fitness exercises were punishments, meted out for mistakes and misbehavior, negative conditioning events. How backwards is that?
Go into the “criminal justice system” with an eye out for things like that, and you really start to wonder what the hell we’re doing. It’s like we’ve set everything up to get more of what we don’t want, in terms of behavior.
Which, I will continue to submit, ain’t the ideal goal for us as a society.
Here is a link to the names of those killed in Israel since October 7th 2023 with pictures of most of them, and the barest snippets of information about many.
It is long, and I think, updated from time to time.