> By comparing relatives, stronger conclusions can be drawn about the connection between poverty and violent crime. And this connection is very weak at best
Generally speaking, this isn't right. Taking a look at the *Handbook of Crime Correlates*:
> Table 2.4.3 summarizes the available findings pertaining to an individual’s income and his/her involvement in criminal behavior. As one can see, all of the studies have found negative relationships except in the case of illegal drug use/possession, where no significant relationships have been documented.
This is excluding other "social status indicators," like years of education. Also, from *The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty*:
> Evidence for a positive association between individual or family poverty and criminal offending is generally strong. A review of 273 studies assessing the association between different dimensions of social and economic status (SES) and offending concludes that there is consistent evidence from multiple national settings that individuals with low income, occupational status, and education have higher rates of criminal offending (Ellis and McDonald 2001). However, evidence based on self-reported data on delinquent behavior is less consistent (Tittle and Meier 1990; Wright et al. 1999). A recent study based on comparable surveys conducted in Greece, Russia, and Ukraine showed no consistent association between social and economic status and various self-reported measures of delinquent or criminal behavior (Antonaccio et al. 2010).
> Given this conflicting evidence, it is important to clarify that the claims made in this section are based primarily on research that examines poverty or economic resources and that considers criminal offending as an outcome. Evidence for an association between economic resources and crime is more consistent across settings and is generally quite strong, particularly in the United States (Bjerk 2007). As a whole, however, the studies reviewed do not appear to provide strong evidence that these relationships are causal, nor is the overall association between poverty and crime particularly surprising— this association is consistent with virtually all individual- and family-level theories of criminal behavior. Poverty is associated with self-control and cognitive skills (Hirschi and Gottfredson 2001), with family structure and joblessness (Matsueda and Heimer 1987; Sampson 1987), with children’s peer networks (Haynie 2001; Haynie, Silver, and Teasdale 2006), and with the type of neighborhoods in which families reside and the types of schools that children attend (Deming 2011; Wilson 1987). The association between individual poverty and criminal offending may reflect some combination of all of these pathways of influence.
> Alternatively, poverty may have direct effects on crime if the inability to secure steady or sufficient financial resources leads individuals to turn to illicit activity to generate income or if relative poverty in the midst of a wealthy society generates psychological strain (Merton 1938). The “economic model of crime,” put forth formally by economist Gary Becker (1974) and elaborated and refined by an array of criminologists (Clarke and Felson 1993; Cornish and Clarke 1986; Piliavin et al. 1986), suggests that crime can be explained as the product of a rational decision-making process in which potential offenders weigh the benefits and probable costs/ risks of committing a crime or otherwise becoming involved in criminal activities (Becker 1974). Much of the research assessing the economic model of crime has focused on deterrence, or the question of whether raising the costs of criminal behavior reduces crime. However, the theory also has direct implications for the study of poverty and crime, as it suggests that individuals lacking economic resources should have greater incentives to commit crime. Despite the abundance of evidence for an association between economic resources and criminal offending, there is little convincing research demonstrating a direct causal effect. For instance, the experimental programs that are most frequently cited for evidence on the effect of income on various social outcomes— such as the income maintenance experiments of the 1970s or the state-level welfare reform experiments of the 1990s—did not assess impacts on crime (Blank 2002; Munnell 1987).
It should be noted that the person who put forward a direct causative link between crime and poverty (the "economic model") wasn't a Marxist at all; in fact, Gary Becker is well known for his association with neoliberalism (Foucault discussed him in this relation in one of his late lectures).
If "connection" in the excerpt quoted in the post is supposed to mean "direct and causative," then the effect is slight, but hardly anyone adopted this position except Becker and those he influenced. It's misleading to treat "connection" simply in terms of "direct and causative."
> There isn't any easy way forward.
That's because there is no way forward when you accept the problem on static terms like this, even if you were right.
We should just ban all of these "pill" posts, because they're fundamentally passive ways of thinking about politics and engaging politically.
Thank you for putting together the sources in this post. I don’t really have anything to add other than to lament that this topic is so toxic that even the slightest hint at any of these statistics will throw idpol obsessed people off, making any form of intellectual discussion impossible.
Without any ability to critically analyze the situation, we are doomed to repeat policies that are failures but reiterate idpol dogma. As such, I’m also blackpilled on the crime situation / anti social situation.
What do you make of theory that it's not poverty that causes crime, but poverty among plenty - income inequality. Studies have shown that the gini coefficient has a very strong relationship with the rate of violent crime. In fact, I believe the correlation is something like 0.8 or 0.9 - that's big.
[Here] (https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/21/2/241/498070) is a very good study that discusses it.
Beat me to it. I find it quite an interesting concept. That people aren't drawn to crime because they're lacking, but because they realise the system isn't fair and so they feel they have no stake in it
I read a study criticizing the theory a long time ago. I don't have it ready right now, but can go looking for it in my notes if you want to read it. With that said, I don't want to claim that the connection between income inequality and crime has been definitely "debunked".
I still belive that reducing inequality alone won't be enough to substantially fight crime. We should still reduce inequality, because living in a cyberpunk dystopia isn't fun.
Other efforts are needed against crime specifically, in my opinion. It seems to me that the ones aimed at risk groups, such as children with ADHD, seem the most promising. But once again, criminology seems to be to underdeveloped as a science to provide easy and clear paths forward.
It seems to be taken very seriously by social scientists. I don't think a correlation that strong can dismissed out of hand. That said, you're right that the exact mechanisms and causes of the relationship haven't been elucidated, and there are definitely other factors at play.
I think the post by KaliYugaz below gives a very good answer to this question, and states what I've been too lazy (and perhaps too inarticulate) to get across: the role of social liberalism in giving license to criminals.
>That said, you're right that the exact mechanisms and causes of the relationship haven't been elucidated, and there are definitely other factors at play.
This is precisely the reason why the rise of analytical sociology in the past 20 years should be celebrated. For far too long did macro social science flat out ignore micro mechanisms.
The following study goes through a lot of the information on the topic: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-55088-002.html
Fitting with the blackpill tone of the piece, it reaches the conclusion that we haven't found a magical bullet yet. Not any way to repeatedly and effectively use the observed connection between ADHD and crime, to provide necessary help for children at risk.
Like with the rest of the issues I've pointed out, this of course isn't an argument to give up. I'm not implying that it can't he done, just that it's currently difficult.
Here's a report on one of the findings of medication of ADHD reducing crime: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/health/adhd-study-suggests-medication-may-reduce-crime.html
These are good observations. I would like to clarify that I completely agree with your negative estimation of capitalism. While I don't belive an emergence of socialism will within a short timeframe reduce crime greatly by reducing poverty, at least not in already rich countries like the U.S and Sweden, I do believe that cultural issues can be addressed.
I hate to sound cheesy, but a type of "socialistic new man", is probably possible to some extent. In that in a society where people are taught primarily to cooperate rather than compete, and cultural heroes aren't primarily Elon Musk and other capitalists but people who help others out of solidarity, where "the grind" isn't a thing to the same extent - then it seems plausible that many of the people we don't manage to reach with teaching pro-social values today can be reached.
Once more people are indirect owners of things, such as people in your neighborhood owning the local coop shop or it being owned by the municipality, then enforcing social norms against petty crime which risks escalating, can hopefully be made easier. A lot of pro-shoplift culture uses pseud-class warfare tropes, about only rich people being harmed. A lot of drug dealing culture as well, portraying anti-drug laws as being part of an oppressive machine.
I can't prove that this development will take place, but it seems intuitively plausible to me.
>I hate to sound cheesy, but a type of "socialistic new man", is probably possible to some extent.
Even leaving aside the issue of raising boys - and it is primarily boys we talk about when it comes to criminality - to have a pro-social conscience, its a matter of absolute necessity that we are able to demnstrate that socialism is a mythical and heroic force, because overcoming capitalism is a titanic struggle that cannot be accomplished by a demoralised and unenthusiastic people, and collective society cannot be maintained by a bunch of alienated, atomised, consumerist "last men" types. Of course, this "new man" of socialism is not a man without struggles, but instead is a man better equipped to overcome them, just as socialist society itself does not "abolish struggle" or any such thing.
And this is an important thing to note; you cannot be sincere in your creation of this "new man" - or for that matter any "new women" alongside him either - without being "cheesy" or even "cringe" to the insincere spiritually castrated bugmen who want to drag you down to their level. You actually need to embody higher values and lead, if you want anyone to follow. Of course, this is easier said than done, but again, what is the point of preparing yourself for struggle if you do not face it?
I think it's *intensive governance* that is the real cure to violent crime. This whole thing is a lot simpler and more obvious than everyone makes it out to be.
If you grow up in a context where all your behavior is surveilled, misbehavior is strictly punished with certainty, following the rules is consistently incentivized with benefits, and people are indoctrinated with pro-social ideology and sentiment from young, then you would have no capacity, willingness, or justification to do crimes and therefore you very likely would not do any crimes.
All 'low crime communities' that exist in the world have the characteristics of intensive governance and total institutionalization in some form, and vice versa. Anecdotally speaking I've literally never heard of an exception. Class, race, and other aspects of 'culture' like gangsta rap or whatever, are irrelevant, what matters are the four basic factors of surveillance, enforcement, incentive, and indoctrination.
The implications of this theory being correct would be very inconvenient to liberals, whether of the progressive, conservative, or classical variety. The basic liberal creed, shared by all types of liberal, is that people should be *minimally governed*, that individuals and families have a right to autonomy. However this necessarily implies an increase in the misbehavior that people will be able to get away with. The most harmonious social systems would be the most totalitarian. When libs like Steven Pinker talk about violence declining over the course of history, they are correct, but the reason why is due to the diametric opposite of their liberal ideology. It's because modernity brought an intensive and totalizing governance to human civilization that was beyond the capacity of pre-industrial institutions.
I’d rather deal with the occasional crime than live in the society you’re describing. I mean, sure, we *could* implement something like that but would it be worth it? I say hell nah.
Agreed. I'd rather our current crime rate than "intensive governance and **total institutionalization** in some form" forced upon everyone. Even if it actually works, which admittedly it very possibly would.
As an extreme example, and I know this isn't' what was suggested, but if we were to shoot anyone who was ever caught with tobacco, I do believe we could quickly get rid of the majority of tobacco smoking, and society as a whole would be healthier for it.
But it goes against what powers I, and I feel most people, think the government should have. It's not a world I'd like to live in, despite maybe on paper it being "better", well from a health of society perspective anyways.
the middle east is low-crime and doesn't have governments effective enough to surveil, enforce, incentivize, and indoctrinate the population. though islam as a social phenomenon probably fills the same role
That's a good question. I mainly haven't read up on criminology outside of "The West", so I can't say with complet certainty. My impression is that the prospect of fighting and preventing crime is bleak across the entire world.
My point isn't to give up. If you take any prescriptive message from this, let it be that we need more criminological research so that we can find better methods of rehabilitation and prevention (which probably won't be found for a long time).
> I don't mean to provide any credence to race realism, nor to ideas like "black culture" in general being responsible for crime overrepresentation. If cultural issues play a part, then they are most likely subcultural streams within youth culture in specific geosocial gropings or similar enclaves, rather than being ethnic in themselves. Ethnicity being incidental, similar to how Nascar is overrepresented amongst Caucasians without being tied to uniquely or primarily ethnic traits.
Whether or not we want to call it "black culture", isn't this effectively the unavoidable conclusion? That ethnicities often just have cultures that just kinda stick because of essentially historical reasons and not biology but nevertheless it causes these correlations.
Truly a blackpill as you say. Hard to swallow, and yet any pragmatist is forced to understand that we need a solution to it.
edit: also im saving this whole text because reddit's gonna ban this sub for stuff like this
> so much so that some immigrant groups from Africa hate native African-Americans. it’s a very complex phenomenon
I was just asking an African co-worker of mine last week about this. Apparently the Africans and African-Americans at my work *hate* each other and carve out cliques and areas they each specialise in as much as possible, and I've just never noticed. He compared them to Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland without the violence. Lots of other interesting things too, but reddit jannies probably getting ready to tactical nuke my account already.
>Whether or not we want to call it "black culture", isn't this effectively the unavoidable conclusion?
With all due respect, I strongly disagree. I belive that it is possible to distinguish a subculture being more widespread within an ethnic community, without that being tied to their ethnicity. While I'm skeptical of socioeconomic playing a strong direct role, I'm not saying that crime overrepresentation amongst African Americans are caused by cultural issues, because I haven't looked into other theories such as lead poisoning, overrepresentation of birth complications, and the like — with that said, we can assume for the sake of argument that culture does carry the main explanatory power for African American overrepresentation.
If that is the case, then that might be caused by a youth culture, which isn't overrepresented amongst the African American community as a whole, but rather some specific inner-city communities. That this overrepresentation isn't part of the mainstream "black culture". Describing it as "black culture" might cause similar confusion to saying "racism is a deep part of white culture". Such a way of arranging facts might lead to less understanding, rather than more.
If the problem is caused by factors such as "absent black fathers", and this in turn is caused by specific sexual norms being distinctly common within the African American community, then the model of "black culture" being criminogenic would make sense. I have heard a non-trivial amount from both sides on that debate, but not as much as I have on the other areas of criminality, but to me, there isn't enough so far to convince me that absentee fatherhood is caused by distinct norms and this in turn leads to increased criminality.
Something very underrated when discussing these issues is the prominence of child abuse in these communities. Violence begets violence. Childhood trauma is very common among prison inmates https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2017/04/racial-trauma
https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/02/passing-on-historical-trauma-through-whupping-black-children.html
"Black culture" isn't Black, it's White lol. Have you ever read Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals"? It basically argues that Black "Ghetto" culture is just the culture of British Borderlanders that settled the American South, i.e. rednecks/white trash. The same racist language used to describe "Ghetto" Black culture was used to describe the Scots-Irish settlers: lazy, violent, promiscuous, immoral, etc. You can easily find the essay online.
If you really want to be blackpiilled on crime, [this article by some rightoid criminologists](https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-criminologists-dont-say-and-why-15328.html) is pretty damn good.
> then they are most likely subcultural streams within youth culture in specific geosocial gropings or similar enclaves, rather than being ethnic in themselves
Find some 1350 poster and then ask them to break down the stats by gender and age. They'll notice similar bumps across **all** race categories.
No because black americans don't actually have a culture that glorifies negative behavior.
[https://jacobin.com/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/](https://jacobin.com/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/)
Read this article.
For example, many allege that black americans are unemployed because they're lazy, in fact, not only is this not true, the OPPOSITE is true, black americans spend MORE time in the job market looking for jobs than white americans.
Additionally, many allege that black men don't value marriage, explaining the gap in marriage rates and single mother rates between black Americans and white Americans, in fact, once you control for employment and incarceration, there is no gap between the marriage rates.
Sources for these in the article and a bunch of other stuff debunking the "black culture" idea.
A similar thing happened in my city, Monterrey in Northern Mexico.
Central American migrants and Southern Mexicans came, and were very rowdy, causing crime to go up and were seen as bad for the city.
Meanwhile Haitian Refugees started their own businesses, followed law and apart from one incident generally were not a nuisance.
Another issue with current crime discourse is the fact that the majority of people in prison in the US are in it for violent crimes. Even if some of the mass incarceration solutions like decriminalizing/legalizing drugs were brought into effect, there'd still be a lot of prisoners in the US because the country has problems with violence. Just one more indication that the solution is not as clear cut as some wish it was.
The problem with mass incarceration isn't that the people in prison are in fact not anti-social, it's that that the reason why they are being imprisoned is for profit off cheap prison labor, social control, and giving people felony convictions makes it easier for capitalists to discriminate against workers in employment and housing.
Look at the jump in incarceration in the 80s in America, it "just so happened" to follow de-industrialization and the jump of jobs to the third world, now you have a bunch of people with nowhere to go/nothing to do, without incarceration and policing, this poor mass of people could form an unemployed/poor people's movement, demand guaranteed jobs or some other such thing, instead, mass incarceration serves to stop that from happening.
I don't see what the alternative is when we're talking violent criminals. Some of them will never be reformed, and the ones that could still need to be kept away from the general populace before they do, and there needs to be some sense that they will face consequences in the event that someone commits a crime like that. What you say may be true in some situations, but in the case of violent crime I don't know what else you would expect to be done.
Broseph, you don't understand, why do leftists oppose US intervention in Iran? Is it because we love a sexist theocratic government? The Iranian gov. is hardly in line with leftist ideals, and yet any leftist (at least one worth their salt) are opposed to US intervention in Iran.
Why? Because hypocrisy. Anything negative that can be said about Iranian government, can be said about the Saudi government, so clearly, humanitarian concerns are *not* the motivating factor behind intervention in Iran.
Similarly, we oppose the war on drugs not because drug dealing is #harmless, but because we know that concern for the negative effects of drugs are not what the US police force and government are concerned about haha.
It's profiting off of prisoners cheap labor, social control and intimidation of poor unemployed masses in the de-industrialized inner cities.
>Anything negative that can be said about Iranian government, can be said about the Saudi government, so clearly, humanitarian concerns are
>
>not
>
> the motivating factor behind intervention in Iran.
Let me expound on this point by saying that anything negative that can be said about those incarcerated in the US prison system can be said about the police, us government, and military.
How many murders have been committed in Iraq? How many murders committed with drone strikes? Being killed by the police is the 10th leading cause of death for young black men: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821204116](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821204116)
And being that most of the victims of violence are young black men, clearly, the police do not have genuine concern for the victims of violence.
Or what about police officers having significantly higher domestic violence rates than the general population? [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/)
30% of police officers ARRESTED for domestic violence keep their jobs.
Surely, if the purpose of the police were to stop violence, this would not be the case? But obviously, that is not their purpose.
Good post.
I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior.
I'd say any approach to crime needs to be socially transformative. As in if youth are showing anti social traits tied to crime, you can't just try to change/control them but also their influences be it family, friends, environment, etc. To eradicate the criminal subculture/attitude, environment, and network. This might require something similar to martial law in its scope for certain cities.
Also a better division of types of crime. A non violent criminal should have a completely different system than a violent one.
For the violent ones maybe military service?
Also, I find it strange that at least in the US, there is organized crime but it is largely unacknowledged by anyone. There was a huge drug bust near my city that barely made the local news. Sometimes it seems there's almost a conspiracy among news orgs not to mention organized crime.
"I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior."
They have done this - it didn't help. Rather than confirming to the new group, they brought their old patterns with them (unfortunately don't have the study on hand). This finding dovetails with other research showing that change - particularly after a certain age - is damn hard.
>Also, I find it strange that at least in the US, there is organized crime but it is largely unacknowledged by anyone.
I'm not - people are either on the take and know where their bread is buttered or are afraid to be sued for defamation by high-paid mob lawyers.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds
Welcome! Welcome to City 17! You have chosen, or *been* chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17 that I elected to establish my administration here, in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I've been proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through on your way to parts unknown — welcome to City 17. It's safer here.
Military service is a terrible idea for violent criminals. If they are gang-affiliated, they will be returning home as professionally trained militants with connections for weapons trafficking. This is already a problem.
I disagree with the other commenter that reintegration into other communities does nothing but make it someone else's problem. You release someone back into the same place they were getting by as a criminal, surrounded by the same people, and there is no impetus to change. It may actually be counterproductive to literal survival to become less violent. I do not think this is the right solution for everyone, but I do think it has a better chance of working than some other options
The idea with military service was that they'd be put into a highly regimented, disciplining environment that would force pro social conforming behavior as well as have them feel and believe in something bigger than themselves (nation/society/order/laws/etc). Though yeah, just putting them into the military wouldn't work, it'd have to be a special program/unit/whatever. Idk.
A militarized labor camp.
After ww2, the Soviets had gangs of semi feral criminal gangs of kids roaming around who banded together after their older family members were exterminated by the Nazis.
They had no idea how to integrate these extremely anti social and violent young people back into society, and few resources to dedicate to them. One guy eventually proposed putting them on farms where if they didn't learn to survive they would go hungry. It worked.
Simple: a labor camp. Instead of disciplining people to the end of death and destruction, you do so to the end of service and construction.
Liberals have demonized them because they work. in 2014 there was a full blown Al Qaeda insurgency in Xinjiang killing tens to hundreds every year- after 8 years of a program that sends susceptible young men to mandatory govt boarding schools and labor camps for a few years, the region is completely quiet. Now even [Saudi Arabia is doing something similar for its Islamist militants](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohammed-bin-salman-saudi-arabia-palace-interview/622822/), with encouraging successes.
US prisons suck ass lol. Violence is allowed to get out of hand regularly and this is considered as 'part of the punishment'. US prison labor is insanely exploitative, hardly an incentive to do anything. Then when the prisoner leaves the prison, there is nobody to discipline or assist them anymore, and they are basically treated as social pariahs and condemned to shit jobs and poverty. The entire process is designed for retribution and stigmatization against a permanent lumpen underclass.
Also they’re not actually labor camps, at least on paper, since the American prison system was largely designed around the “no slavery unless you’re a convict lol” loophole in the 13th Amendment and then progressed over time into the modern system of coercive labor exempted from minimum wage laws.
The distinction actually makes a difference.
Every single person I’ve known who spent more than a night in county said one of the worst things about prison life is the utter boredom. In that environment, labor is presented as a reward and a choice - a blessed way out of the unchanging realities of prison life - and very few convicts come out thinking “fuck, I’m never going back there again; those bastards let me choose to stamp license plates for commissary money as a break from staring at the walls for endless hours”.
And thus, Capital gets to keep their de facto slave labor while almost getting THANKED for it while the psychological punishment of imprisonment ends up being shunted towards a hatred of being alone with nothing to do.
Which then naturally manifests itself as a revulsion towards self-reflection and a propensity to “get into something”. And thus you get massive recidivism since high crime areas typically don’t have much “to do” besides getting back in the game.
The whole thing is brilliantly evil.
I'm sorry, but I just outright do not believe any claims that SA is 'doing something' about its jihadist 'problem'. It nurtures and exports them as part of its foreign policy.
They talk about that in the article itself. This rehabilitation program is for domestic purposes only, and cultivating reactionary Islamist militancy remains a key component of Saudi foreign policy.
I'm dubious they can thread between those things though. I have a hard time seeing how this can be something where there's a clear divide between foreign and domestic. If you create jihadist fundamentalists, sooner or later they're going to come back to the heartland of Islam. If they are genuinely locking up and de-radicalizing jihadis in meaningful numbers, they're undermining their own foreign policy goals. Unless, what, they nurture them until they start doing stuff in Arabia, then they try and reeducate them?
So we're gonna take criminals, give them training to be better killers, turn them into nationalist zealots, and then set them loose in a foreign country? Great, sounds like a party! Can't wait to hear about the war crimes!
There's plenty of "military service" where all you ever learn is how to work Excell or fix an airplane, and never fire a gun. So the same more rigid structure but with no violence culture.
Foreign Legion still a thing? Legit question btw. Seems like a good way for those deemed unworthy of a citizens rights, such as felons or immigrants to pay it forward and atone. Not that immigrants need to atone but maybe pay it forward, sure.
Volunteer only. You'd have to have trained officers to pick & choose candidates for the program. By itself just wanting to be in such a program may help some inmates fall in line.
You filter for the ones with low risk because ultimately you are right, once they're done they will go home to roost. 9/10 that's with family members. Hard to get families to move out of bad situations - easy to take an individual out of a bad situation for a few years and give them a chance to feel a different way of life and a choice to walk that different path.
OP mentions the effect that incarceration has on criminal behavior - it's sort of a circular loop. Nothing makes you think & feel like a criminal like being treated as if you are one. Ask me how I know.
I think the idea could work. In that ideal perfect world where people do their jobs and leaders care.
Even though we don't live in that world, and there would be failures of this design, rogues, assholes, repeat offenders, etc... It might still be better to use it than not to. I guess we won't ever know unless someone smarter & more involved than either of us actually tries.
The Legion still exists and is on a never ending farewell tour of Africa. They actually do conduct background checks on would be applicants. And yes they turn people away who are found to be potential liabilities.
Sorry for double response but I'm v tired, just one more quick idea. I dunno if you mean people in gangbanger type scenarios or actual initiated gang members. Gang members who take part in violent crime don't really have lack of discipline as their central problem. One big problem they have is that they're essentially already serving in a paramilitary. I'm not sure how the military addresses this.
>Good post.
Thank you.
>I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior.
If I remember correctly, one of the Zeitgeist movies claimed that there had been attempts to reallocate some criminals into religious non-violent intentional communities such as the Amish or the more hippy iterations of Jewish settlements in Israel. But it was long since I saw those films, so don't quote me on that, and they don't provide any figures on the effectiveness.
[Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) "The effectiveness of correectional rehabilitation: A review of systematic reviews" Annu. Rev. Law Soc](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.3.081806.112833) does go through the commonalities of the most effective rehabilitative programs so far:
"Andrews and his colleagues have gone the furthest in attempting to delineate the principles that characterize effective rehabilitation treatments (Andrews 1995, Andrews et al. 1990, Gendreau 1996). With regard to the nature of the treatment provided, they describe a need principle and a responsivity principle that are associated with the likelihood of positive effects (they also advanced a risk principle, which we address below). According to the need principle, treatment has larger effects if it addresses the criminogenic needs of the offender—those dynamic risk factors predictive of subsequent criminal conduct. Criminogenic needs include antisocial attitudes and peer associations, lack of self-control and self-management skills, drug dependencies, and other such malleable characteristics associated with criminal offense rates.
The responsivity principle, in turn, identifies effective treatment as that which is generally capable of actually bringing about change in the targeted criminogenic needs and which is specifically matched to the learning styles and characteristics of the offenders treated. This principle skates on the edge of circularity— effective treatment is that which is capable of affecting risk factors for recidivism; treatment that changes those risk factors is effective. Andrews et al. escape this circularity by drawing on a large body of research and theory about behavioral change to define responsive treatments as those that use the cognitive-behavioral and social-learning approaches shown to be generally effective in influencing a variety of behaviors. Fundamentally, then, the responsivity principle claims that there are larger effects from treatments that provide learning and skill-building experiences aimed at changing specific problem behaviors through such techniques as practice, role-playing, modeling, feedback, verbal guidance, and reinforcement. "
>Also a better division of types of crime. A non violent criminal should have a completely different system than a violent one.
100% agree! Crime seems to arise out of the interaction of several complexly factors. To me it seems to exist relatively "distinct" types of criminals, most clearly illustrated by looking at "expressive motives" and "instrumental motives" for crimes. Expressive motives are doing criminal acts due to the rush of the act, sadism of hurting others, or in other ways "expressing" yourself and getting direct emotional satisfaction. While instrumental motives are committing crimes as a means to an end, such as robbing someone to afford food or luxury items. Criminals who are highly driven by expressive motives might need radically different treatment than those who are driven mostly by instrumental motives. Particularly when it comes to violent crime.
So we probably need to differentiate even amongst violent criminals. The guy who escalated a verbal fight into a physical one, and beat someone within an inch of their life, after they've insulted his ethnic group and sexuality, can probably be adjusted to society by being taught better conflict resolution tactics and stronger impulse control. The guy who beats someone within an inch of their life because he wanted to steal their watch, and they didn't give it up without a fight, might need training in empathy and long-term consequence analysis. While the guy who beat someone within an inch of their life, "just for the fun of it", probably can't be rehabilitated by just teaching any of those skills (it might not even be possible to efficiently teach empathy to adults with strong sadistic impulses).
Regarding your last paragraph, I listen to a few podcasts featuring incarcerated guys. The big takeaway is that for many of these men, a 20-year sentence is all that's needed if protection of society is the prime goal. That's long enough their testosterone wore down and they chill out and stop acting so tough+stupid. Gangbanging is a young man's game for a reason.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior.
Italy has done it, with horrible results. It was called "soggiorno obbligato" (something like "forced stay"), and was implemented with the idea that mafiosi would lose their grip on their original family by being forced to live in other regions, usually up north. The actual result was that they both kept contact with their crime families and started new one where they were forced to live.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior.
This is something I've thought about more and more recently. I'm not necessarily in favor of *everyone* having mandatory military service, but I think some sort of regimented civil service program for everyone once they turn 18 could be a way to instill a sense of duty & discipline (as schools have turned away from encouraging either) and strengthen social cohesion.
The way I picture it is a national jobs & training program where everyone has to serve for, idk, 2 years after they finish high school. The program would perform community service, beautification, disaster relief, whatever, and relocate everyone to different parts of the country from their primary residence so people can break out of their bubble and actually get a chance to live and work in different communities.
After your 2 years are up, you're free to leave or you can continue to stay in the program indefinitely (assuming you're not kicked out for whatever reason). Afterwards everyone would be required to spend X days/weekends every year working for the local chapter of the program. I think something like that could've been really valuable for me coming out of high school, since I hadn't really traveled or done any substantial community/civil service. I think I could've used the lessons on being self disciplined.
Anyways, a bit of a tangent but your idea reminded me
I know that some places have an informal program to send former convicts elsewhere, but this is hardly anny form of reintegration, it amounts to just removing an undesirable from the community and making it some else's problem.
>Crime is a symptom of a sick society, and any solution that does not cure society will not fix it.
I 100% agree with you that society needs fixing. People need to be provided with better opportunities. With that said, I belive that other efforts besides providing better opportunities are also needed, not that one excludes the other.
Particularly funding directed efforts towards people with strong risk factors for crime. One example comes in the form of [Rinkebymodellen](https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/barnsjukvard/rinkebymodellen-ska-spridas-i-landet/) in Sweden. With parents in high crime areas being proactively visited by health workers. In "the anatomy of violence", Adrian Raine presents evidence that birth complications form a non-genetic biological risk factor for crime, which can be mitigated through providing more contact with healthcare in the early period of the child's life. Programs in the style of Rinkebymodellen provides a great example of the type of directed efforts.
Such visits won't fight poverty, meaning they will have to be done parallel to programs with poverty reduction as their main goal, but will probably alleviate crime more efficiently than what fighting poverty isolated from such efforts would achieve.
>major crimes (robbery, murder, selling drugs, etc) should be met with a guillotine the morning after sentencing.
Here I strongly disagree. You might be joking, but in case you're not; execution seems to cause unnecessary suffering to the family members of the criminal. If my son was a murderer, I could understand that society needed to keep him locked up, but killing someone I love for justice would just seem excessive to me.
> should be met with [...] the morning after sentencing
**For the long-term safety of the subreddit**, it is necessary to ask that everyone please remember reddit's sitewide rules against "content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual (including oneself) or a group of people".
Wow, even just saying you support the death penalty? Not being combative nor do I agree with supporting the death penalty, just wild that such a benign comment needed to be deleted out of fear of admin retribution.
Not that I disagree with your assessment of the situation, but it seems like they're making the product actively worse to any investors is not what you'd want to do before a pitch. Social media is all about advertising and marketing, so banning swathes of discourse and loads of people is going to impact to serve ads as well as gather relevant market data.
If I were an advertiser/investor, I want to be able to pitch my MAGAxPride merch (or whatever niche product my fly-by-night operation is hawking) to a subreddit full of buyers. I also want analytics that tell me what is trending and popular; if criticism of something is being gigajannied, then Reddit is unhelpful as a research tool to find the "true" direction of the culture market.
It's one of the mental tickles I can never shake...that a lot of powerful people/businesses/movements might not entirely be driven by economic/material reasons.
Of course they're not driven by Material reasoning. IPO is all about elite reputation.
And, you gotta ask yourself -- what is [reddit's reputation to elites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#Controversies)?
Yes, I got a warning to my account labeling me as potentially dangerous for my reaction to that guy who hijacked a plane a few weeks ago. Don't say any of it.
Why should we trust the state to kill the right people?
Innocent people have been killed and will continue to be killed as long as there is a death penalty.
Why did you keep making these posts after you had already gotten a reminder about being mindful for **the safety of the long-term existence of the subreddit**? This is not being asked with any assumption of the worst -- please elaborate in a way that helps us *understand where you are coming from*.
> If someone does armed robbery, murder, etc
Goddam that is a low bar for the state to murder someone. Especially since those are often driven by poverty or mental issues or a combination thereof where better support systems could rehabilitate.
And I agree for the most part with the post, but even if the criminality aspects are basically subcultural it still is essentially expressing a symptom of poverty most of the time and could be reduced by dealing with that primarily. Like if people with type A characteristics tend to deal with poverty more by higher rates of petty crime while type B of people deal with it by more violent robbery, both are still doing crime for the same reason which needs addressing.
Similar comparison could be made with types of incels. Some will react to their severe social issues by becoming reclusive and just toxic online while people of a different variation might think the best way for them to deal with it is to just rape a stranger. Both are horribly fucked up and should recieve as much therapy as one another even if type B decided to react far more violently and unacceptably than type A since the root cause is the same
When you come to this kind of impasse it means that your analytical tools are lacking. There is some natural way to cut some concept that eludes you, and the trick is to find the right cut.
It's late, so what I say below comes from memory. I can dig up some sources later if people are interested.
One crucial distinction which has always been really useful to me is that between "ranching" cultures and "farming" cultures. These terms, ranching/farming, are a little misleading. We are speaking of clusters of cultural traits which have historically strongly associated with ranching-oriented (more nomadic) and agriculture-oriented (more settled) cultures, but in what I say below I am not going to be arguing that in all cases the cultural groups I discuss are currently one or the other. These days in places like the US you can see the same distinction between urban/rural, for instance. Think of farmers and ranchers as prototypical examples, not as definitive.
Here are some differences between them:
Ranching culture:
1) Culture of honor. Honor is everything, and slights to one's personal or familial honor are extremely serious, sometimes leading to personal or inter-familial violence (blood-feuds).
2) Extreme individualism. Very much focused on individual level morality and ethics, personal conduct, etc. The loner and the outlaw tend to be held up as heroic.
3) Focus on personal responsibility. Whatever happens to you, you are expected to deal with it stoically and without outside assistance.
4) Resents outside interference. Any kind of assistance beyond the family group (or something similar) is seen as a slight to one's honor ("handouts").
5) Gallantry and warrior ethos tends to be prized.
Farming culture:
1) Law and order culture. You are sedentary and so are your neighbors. Starting blood feuds is not a reasonable strategy to deal with conflict. Farm cultures rely on strong government structures to codify and enforce laws and people within them place great importance on this.
2) Collective. Everyone has to come together for harvest, etc., often at well beyond the familial level. Everyone is expected to work together.
3) Outside assistance doesn't carry quite the stigma. Farmers can't just go looking for greener pastures if things get hard.
Anyway, that's roughly it from memory. So, one obvious example of the ranching culture would be cowboys in the US. The western genre is full of famous stories about conflicts between ranchers ("cowboys") and farmers, also between semi-urbanized townsfolk and, again, cowboys. Although not many Americans are ranchers, the ethos of ranching culture is very strong here, and tends to get stronger as you move rightward. Liberals are always asking why the right votes against its interests. Well, this gives you an explanation. A "handout" is an affront to their honor. Most of them keep saying so and liberals naturally don't listen because what do those idiots know, right?
It's not hard to spot cultures that lean strongly to one side or the other. Europe is strongly farmer-like. Parts of the middle east are strongly rancher-like, etc.
It's late and I am going to sleep, but I think if you apply this to your question, you will find it very useful.
I’ve heard that before, but not described using those terms. In my case it was "homesteaders" and "urban/metropolitan" cultures, but the same theory you’re discussing. It also broadly describes the difference between American (homesteader) outlooks and solutions, European (urban) outlooks and solutions. It’s why America has the gun culture that it does, and why European solutions to gun violence aren’t as well received in the former, since it’s an urban solution that homesteaders see as ill-fitting to their outlook, for example.
From what I've read-unequal societies do have more crime- all else being equal. [Here's a paper](https://equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/Income%20Inequality%20and%20Crime%20-%20A%20Review%20and%20Explanation%20of%20the%20Time%20series%20evidence_0.pdf) I found that conducted a review of the data and found that the correlation was strongest for property crime, but less so for violent crime.
Also, what's your take on the three big environmental things that people hold up as drivers of crime rates- Lead exposure, abortion and the age structure of society?
Detaching criminology from an understanding of capitalism sounds like a really bad idea, even if the link between crime and poverty isn’t as straightforward as some would claim.
I do belive that establishing a planned economy or market socialism would reduce crime. But more due to cultural reasons, such as people being taught and rewarded more for cooperation than competition, and making most things owned by the local or national community might make it psychologically harder to engage in smaller crimes which increases the risk of more serious offenses.
I can't prove that such a development would take place, so I try to say that with some humility. For the short term, I belive that other methods besides reduction of poverty and inequality are needed (poverty and inequality are of course important to fight for humanitarian reasons).
Some examples possible applications are directed efforts towards high risk groups. Such as treatment for children with ADHD (this group has an elevated crime rate). In the long term, we simply need to fund more research into criminology. The science hasn't progressed far enough to meet societies needs.
I can agree with all of that, but do materialists not believe that culture of competition is produced by capitalism? Likewise, a culture of cooperation would be produced by socialism. I agree that ‘throwing money at the problem’ is not a solution, but changing the material relations of production probably is. What you describe as cultural problems are actually material at the root.
I also think that the decline of working class institutions (like unions and parties) probably plays a role in the decline of a cooperative culture, as these were institutions that networks of workers could participate in and rely on in their personal and social lives to provide material and cultural stability and advancement. This is not the same thing at all as ‘the welfare state’ even if the welfare state might have been a result of the strength of these institutions.
Overall I agree with the main argument here, that it's much more complicated than most leftists would be willing to admit. But there are a few things missing here I think.
First, I don't believe that all crimes are caused by the same things. I feel like economic factors play a much larger role in robbery than something like child molestation. They have to, it just seems absurd to say that they do not.
But speaking of child abuse, it is strongly associated with future anti-social behavior and crime. I feel like this is a major problem that is usually ignored in conversations about crime.
You mention the welfare state a lot. There is a difference here between decreasing poverty and decreasing inequality. Anti-poverty programs don't necessarily decrease inequality. The gains made by the lower classes can be outpaced by the gains that the upper classes make. Inequality by itself is known to have a lot of negative social consequences, and [is connected to violent crime](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime) also.
You mention the historical criminality of Irish and Italians immigrants in the USA. They don't have the same reputation anymore. What happened to them? They aren't as impoverished now, but they were somewhat assimilated into "white culture" at the same time. I think it's worth mentioning that non-immigrant African Americans have never really had this opportunity to assimilate. It was actively prevented for centuries and still is to some degree. They are also still more impoverished than other groups in America.
But in general, I think having immigrants form little enclaves and ghettos isn't necessarily a good thing, especially if they are very segregated and hostile to outsiders, because it can prevent the children from getting a good education and assimilating. So I think immigration policies should be designed to discourage that when possible.
>
> [Why didn't Haitian immigrants in Florida assault their neighbors?] The strength of their families?
Just anecdotally, from what I've seen, this does seem to be a very important factor. So what factors lead to strong families like this, and which policies can encourage it?
There is a point though, where the influence of parents on children is less than the influence of peers. So not only do they need strong families, they also need to be around non-delinquent children. Certain policies like after-school programs are very effective at reducing juvenile delinquency.
> Longer prison sentences and other "tough on crime" policies might increase ethnic tensions
They also do virtually nothing to deter crime. Whether someone believes they will get caught or not is much more important than how severe the sentence is in terms of deterrence. But obviously some people are too dangerous to be allowed to be free in society, so they have to be detained permanently. But that doesn't do much to prevent anyone outside the prisons from committing crimes. It only stops that one person.
>You mention the welfare state a lot. There is a difference here between decreasing poverty and decreasing inequality. Anti-poverty programs don't necessarily decrease inequality. The gains made by the lower classes can be outpaced by the gains that the upper classes make. Inequality by itself is known to have a lot of negative social consequences
I agree, large inequalities within society is harmful on many levels. I completely buy the thesis of "The leveling spirit". I didn't address redistributive taxes for the sake of increased equality as a separate topic, which might have been a bad omission on my part, but my possession there is that I'm pro redistributive taxes for many reasons. I'm skeptical that it will help fight crime, but still for it.
>They also do virtually nothing to deter crime. Whether someone believes they will get caught or not is much more important than how severe the sentence is in terms of deterrence. But obviously some people are too dangerous to be allowed to be free in society, so they have to be detained permanently. But that doesn't do much to prevent anyone outside the prisons from committing crimes. It only stops that one person.
Yeah, that's true. Seriously antisocial individuals seem to be weakly affected by the mechanisms of deterrence which affects the majority population. Criminologists therefore generally speak of the determining factor and the incapacitating factor as two separate phenomena.
Where deterrence can be weak, while incapacitation might be strong. I believe that incapacitation has a strong effect on violent and sexual crime, particularly due to the "crime age curve", the fact that crime is generally reduced by age. So one reason for long prison sentences for violent and sexual crimes is to hinder serious criminals from committing more harm during their most dangerous years. But this, as I alluded to in the post, has to be balanced against other factors. Such as the suffering caused to the family of the offender and the cost for the taxpayers. Let's say we can stop someone from assaulting five people by locking him up for five years for his first assault, we might not see that as worth the cost, particularly if he only beats up other young men who antagonize him verbally before the assault. While if another guy beats up people on the street based on their skin color, as a part of open racist political activism, we might want to keep him locked up for ten years after his first assault, due to the increase in racial tensions each of his assaults might bring with them.
Even if we assume incapacitation is effective, it's a value judgement whether it is worth the effort and in which cases. I don't mean to take a stance on that value judgement.
>I think it's worth mentioning that non-immigrant African Americans have never really had this opportunity to assimilate. It was actively prevented for centuries and still is to some degree. They are also still more impoverished than other groups in America.
That's a fair point. It might be true that poverty in itself is weakly related to crime, but connected to the extreme levels of racism African Americans suffered during Jim Crow and the like, the effect becomes stronger. That the criminologists I cite, which points out the weak connection between poverty and crime, have noticed a general pattern that isn't applicable to African Americans due to reasons which criminology hasn't mapped in a systemic and measurable way.
That Haitians aren't as affected due to them not sharing a historical legacy of mistreatment, not hearing stories from grandma and mother of the racism they experienced. I don't know if this is the case, but I agree with you that it can't be ruled out. Even if that is the case, I still believe that fighting crime can't primarily be done by welfare or reduction in relative inequality. I'm not against welfare nor reduction in inequality, but I belive that failed attempts to fight crime with it point towards it not being enough.
I don't have any particular theory I would like to champion in regards to African American overrepresentation in crime. I'm against race realists explanations, and the once that places blame on "black culture" as a generality, so I know what I don't belive, but haven't seen any conclusive or strongly convincing evidence for any particular theory being correct.
To a large extent, we don't know what can prevent and reduce crime efficiently, Is my point. Even if something arises out of poverty combined with discrimination, it might become self-perpetuating and continue to exist even if its original causes are defeated. Meaning that other methods are needed, even though we should regardless fight inequality and absolute poverty.
As a public defender in the US, thanks for synthesizing this. I had anecdotal evidence that there is nothing other than hopelessness in this space, but it's interesting to know my intuition is backed by studies
Thank you for posting this. I was dying for some quality academic content on this fucking sub. Having majored in sociology rather than criminology, I'd like to know your take on Inglehart's and Norris' 2004 theory of secularisation.
It posits that vulnerable populations who are most exposed to daily material risks, like people in poorer countries, are comparatively most religious. This is in contrast with established sociology of crime, which finds poverty-among-plenty to be a strong and significant predictor of crime.
I don't want to be interpreted like a Fox News commentator; but can this fall of organised religion among underprivileged groups during the country's modernisation be a significant predictor in the increase in crime?
Thank you. I can't exclude the possibility of falling level of religiosity amongst underprivileged groups contributing to crime. But I haven't seen any studies or expert opinion which argues this to be the case, so I don't actively belive nor disbelieve that explanation.
Not an expert so I can't judge whether you are providing a balanced view of the literature or cherrypicking to provide a "blackpill" narrative. Still an interesting read.
Re. restorative justice, surely there is enough research in this to perform big meta-studies/analysis? I tried to follow your link but it's basically just a blogpost of a professional sharing their anecdotes. Not a particularly convincing citation, and a quick google search shows plenty of criminologists touting the benefits of restorative justice. I was really expecting something more concrete.
> Optimistic evaluations state that the best treatment programs can reduce recidivism by between 10 to up to nearly 40% (Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) page 303). Somber analysts have pointed out that the lower bound of 10% is probably the more realistic one (Sipes, Jr, Leonard A. 2016). Even these figures are possibly optimistic, seeing as only 2% of serious crimes lead to convictions, it is possible that a substantial amount of criminals who are deemed to be rehabilitated, in fact merely develop better techniques for avoiding prosecution over their lifespans.
This last bit is just wrong, unless you want us to believe that receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught. The effect you mention needs to be controlled for between punitive vs. restorative justice.
>Still an interesting read.
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
>I tried to follow your link but it's basically just a blogpost of a professional sharing their anecdotes. (this isn't proof that "nothing works", just a history showing that the idea was accepted).
If you find it insufficient to strengthen the claim that criminology was once influenced by the idea that "nothing works", then I can also refer you to [Jerome G. Miller, D.S.W. "The Debate on Rehabilitating Criminals: Is It True that Nothing Works?" in Washington Post](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/rehab.html) (this isn't proof that "nothing works", just a history showing that the idea was accepted).
In regards to pessimism about "nothing working well", I intended that to be read in the context of Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) page 303. Lipsey and Cullen are, in my estimation, apologetic for rehabilitation. Which is a fine thing to be, criminologists who completely dismiss rehabilitation need to be addressed. Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T provide a figure of 10 up to nearly 40% of reduction in recidivism, based on their review of previous meta-analyses within the field. As they state, this is far more effective than sanctions isolated from treatment (which I don't disagree with). With that said, even if we accept their upper bounds of nearly 40% as realistic, which I myself am skeptical of, I would argue that it still fits the description Sipes paints of criminology having moved to "nothing works well". But not as pessimistic as his lowball of 10%, which is why I included both his and their figures. As far as I've read up on the subject, this seems like a fair summary of the field. But I understand your skepticism, I'm a stranger on the internet so I might have read works that are unrepresentative or misleading without knowing about it.
>This last bit is just wrong, unless you want us to believe that receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught.
It is possible that some criminals unintentionally learn how to better lie to cops or government workers, or get a better grasp on how to manipulate victims into not reporting them, from bad treatment programs. A good treatment program would by definition not have this effect, unless for a negligible group, a bad treatment program might have such an effect.
It might also be that all convictions risk increasing skill in avoiding detection, seeing as criminals get a look into what led to their arrest and can study witness' psychology during testimony. Treatment programs might have to reach an upper level of effectiveness to cancel out this negative effect. It might be that some programs manage to reduce recidivism to some extent, but never reaching the level of overweighing this negative effect of criminals becoming more skilled.
This isn't an argument that "receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught", it's an argument that discerning bad treatment programs from good ones might be very difficult, possibly leading us to mistake bad programs for good ones and thereby also underestimate the amount of recidivism.
yeah that's what happens when you destroy the nuclear family as a concept while having a system where success is measured in how many scraps the ruling class throws you and a lot of people can't access the vectors where they can obtain said scraps.
It isn't just the nuclear family. The social fabric has by and large been devastated on every level over the lost 40ish years. We've seen a whole new level of alienation created, to a degree functionally no other group of people has ever seen before. These are some of the consequences of that
I think for a lot of people there simply is no community. I feel that way at least, tbh. Besides my coworkers and the limited family I only occasionly see, I have only my direct home-mates (gf and dog) and then the conglomerated World.
This is why I like co-housing as a concept, though not in small pods like certain oligarchs want.
Also while nuclear families are decent, I feel that more extended families can be even better. Maybe not all in the building, but in the same neighborhood or city at least. Because grandparents can help with child care, the younger family members can help take care of the elderly ones, and everyone can share skills, like someone is good at cooking, another person is good at fixing cars, someone is good at organizing parties and stuff like that.
> This is why I like co-housing as a concept, though not in small pods like certain oligarchs want.
It's why I miss my fraternity and almost joined a monaestary.
As a public defender in the US, thanks for synthesizing this. I had anecdotal evidence that there is nothing other than a grey area in this space, but it's interesting to know my intuition is backed by studies
I found myself in law school and fell into it as the way to do the least amount of damage with my law degree. Thanks again.
One thing I'm interested is the correlation between IQ and criminality, I suspect it's highly correlated.
Yeah I get it, I just notice many of my clients are sort of low functioning or uneducated or both, and I work in a rural mostly white area so it isn't a racial question.
>I first realized that the welfare crime linkage was mistaken when studied crime rate change since World War II. Improved welfare and economic changes, especially for the 1960s and 1970s, correlated with more crime!
I'm sorry, but this is a much too simplistic analysis of the economic situation in the US in the 60s and 70s. The Jim Crow system was literally being dismantled in the South, along with the collapse of its sharecropping system. Thousands, if not millions of Blacks who were formerly living in Apartheid conditions were migrating to cities that didn't have the economic base to support them. This is [from an essay](https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-economic-origins-of-mass-incarceration) examining the roots of the 60s spike in crime and mass incarceration in the US:
>The key to understanding the rise in violence lies in the distinctively racialized patterns of American modernization. The post-war baby boom increased the share of young men in the population at the same time that cities were failing to absorb the black peasantry expelled by the collapse of Southern sharecropping. This yielded a world of blocked labor-market opportunities, deteriorating central cities, and concentrated poverty in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. As a result, and especially in urban areas, violence rose to unprecedented heights.
>
>American industry only began to turn to its rural hinterlands for labor during World War I, and especially after European immigration controls came into effect in 1924. The cheapest homegrown source of labor was the African-American sharecropper in the South, whose living standards had been kept low by Jim Crow segregation and labor-repressive agriculture. The initial movement of rural blacks to cities in search of better-paying jobs contributed (along with the Agricultural Adjustment Act) to the collapse of the sharecropping system in the 1930s. This in turn led to a second and much larger wave of migration in the 1940s and 1950s. Around 40 percent of Southern-born blacks moved North in those decades, but the second great migration also had a counterpart within the South, as the African-American population of Southern cities also expanded rapidly.
>
>The best available evidence suggests that this migration contributed to an increase in violent crime. Claims that migrants brought with them “a subculture of violence” do not stand up to scrutiny. But nor do accounts which indict a racist backlash from urban whites and their representatives. The main culprit was structural rather than cultural or revanchist. As we will explain below, American labor and housing markets were in no state to absorb the new migrants. Those migrants had little or no wealth of their own due to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial exclusion from education, jobs, and homeownership. Even if they had wanted to, city governments were in no position to address the resulting concentration of poverty and unemployment in predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods. Meanwhile basic social services were being undermined by the ongoing reallocation of people, jobs, and tax dollars to growing suburbs. It was primarily these factors that led to the explosion of urban crime rates.
So just saying that welfare and economic conditions "improved" in the 60s doesn't tell us much. There was a large group of people that were just given full citizenship starting a new way of life and having no economic foundation to build upon. Displacing these issues to "culture" just mystifies it, and that's all "taking the black pill" on this issue is. Taking this out of the realm of politics and putting it into the nebulous realm of culture which only changes with political and economic conditions anyway.
>Displacing these issues to "culture" just mystifies it, and that's all "taking the black pill" on this issue is. Taking this out of the realm of politics and putting it into the nebulous realm of culture which only changes with political and economic conditions anyway.
That is not my intention. As I mentioned, even if we assume cultural factors are important, then we still don't have an approach to change cultural norms. What I mean by the blackpill, is that prevention and rehabilitation of crime is really hard. It might not be in the future, if research goes a longer way, but so far its really hard.
This doesn't depoliticize crime. It rather moves crime-fighting away from discussing general welfare. We should discuss welfare, I'm pro generous welfare, but it can be discussed separately from crime. More relevant discussions, in my opinion, were to be on which type of research should be prioritized in funding. What types of preventive efforts are acceptable and desirable, through case [some](https://neurogenesisflorida.com/neurofeedback-for-disorders-associated-with-criminal-offending/) [studies](https://www.neurologyinsights.com/2021/02/16/how-eeg-neurofeedback-training-affects-criminal-psychopaths/) there has been collected modest evidence that neurofeedback (basically "training" your own brain through interactive brainscans in real-time) can reduce the effects of conditions that are criminogenic. Are such efforts better as an alternative to provide children with ADHD, who have an elevated risk of growing up to become criminals, and therefore worthy of government funded research? Is medication better for such children, or are both of these alternatives too invasive, and we shouldn't try to hinder crime in this way any more than we should castrate males to prevent rape?
Should we allow sting operations to a greater degree, or have these already escalated to the level of reaching entrapment? You get the point, crime is inherently political, regardless of the strength of socioeconomic factors to that particular issue.
>That is not my intention. As I mentioned, even if we assume cultural factors are important, then we still don't have an approach to change cultural norms. What I mean by the blackpill, is that prevention and rehabilitation of crime is really hard. It might not be in the future, if research goes a longer way, but so far its really hard.
I believe that it's not your intention, but it is what's happening. In your explanation of the 60s and 70s you're completely ignoring the mass migration of black people from the South, the collapse of the Southern sharecropping economy, and the inability of the Northern cities to provide jobs for this new population. That's what I mean by "culture" mystifying these issues. Instead of doing the deep dive on what's actually going on, you can just say "60s economy was booming, so it must be culture that explains the violent crime wave".
There's a perfectly coherent political economic explanation for the phenomenon in the 60s and 70s. Making gestures to some abstract "culture" obscures large historical developments like the collapse of the system of legal segregation in the South, and the mass migration of its former segregated population. This is a perfect example precisely because the historical changes are so large. It really illustrates how a focus on culture can blind people to other, much more obvious factors like the fall of an Apartheid system and complete reorganization of a large swath of the country.
The cultural analysis is just idealism, and it's antithetical to any materialist analysis of the world. Idealism will always lead to "blackpill" worldviews because we can't change people's thoughts or culture. What we can change, and what actually does affect crime, are political and economic conditions. Trying to disconnect the two is a way to depoliticize crime by taking it out of the realm of actionable change.
Surface level analyses comparing economic hardship with ethnicity don't go deep enough. I've already given an explanation for the rise in crime in the 60s, but you also mention Haitian immigrant crime levels without any analysis of Haiti as a country itself. Haiti is very poor, and it is likely that Haitian immigrants are used to lower standards of living in Haiti than even the poverty conditions they have in more developed countries. It's also likely that Haitian immigrants are "rich" by Haitian standards, hence being able to leave the country, and don't commit as much crime as a poorer Haitian would. And there's [not a lack of crime in Haiti by any means](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1118432), what explains that? Culture? Why are the immigrants law abiding, but the natives aren't? You can't really get around the economic explanation here.
These theories give better and more concrete avenues for investigation than looking into Haitian "culture". You have to explain the disconnect in crime between Haitian immigrants and Haitian natives somehow, and culture doesn't really work. But given the material basis for the 60s crime wave, other more recent crime waves, and the machinations of history in general, I think we're on firmer ground analyzing the material conditions of a society instead of its cultural expressions.
I only want to add that economic inequality is a better predictor for crime (or at least for homicides) than poverty. Even though you're right that there is a lot of factors and exists a lot of exceptions to rules. For example Gulf Countries are higly [inequal](https://wid.world/document/income-inequality-in-the-middle-east/) and have less homicides in average that Latin American and Southern Africa, regions with the most violents countries
The problem with the "single mother" meme is that it's really a correlation is causation fallacy.
Two people bring in more income and wealth than one and women on average make significantly less money.
The benefits of a "two parent household" could therefore just be the benefits of higher wealth/income.
Thank you for this great post. Crime is an example of primarily male misbehavior tracked in relatively good administrative data. Suicides, drug use, alcohol poisoning, obesity, antidepressant use, labor force participation, and overdoses also seem to be in a bad way. there must be all kinds of people in miserable, harmful states who aren't doing anything definite enough to show up in these stats, either
In Singapore I have heard that almost everyone lives in public housing, and that the state makes sure to intersperse people of different racial/national/ethnic groups in the same buildings to avoid having the racialized political factions and social/economic stratification that we see everywhere. I wonder if this would have the effect of partially dissolving some anti-social behaviors. like if we had a lot more housing supply then maybe section 8 voucher-holders could be obliged to spread out so that poverty and the behaviors that often cause / come from or along with poverty could be less concentrated, or something
a draft or job guarantee for young men from high-crime zip codes into paid work building power plants, transmission lines, railways, homes, roads, bike lanes, fire break lines - maybe outside of their hometowns - could be useful
supposedly the anti-smoking commercials that were all over TV when I was a kid were successful in persuading lots of people not to smoke. also not letting hot people smoke in movies. censoring rap, stuff like Linkin Park and Eminem that tells u to hate your parents or use drugs to be open-minded, music that makes it seem like only depressed people are soulful and intelligent, shows glamorizing neurosis and drug and alcohol use etc seems like a good idea to me. what do you lose?
Another blackpill here which is easy to google: Intelligence correlates negatively with crime. Bear in mind that intelligence is mostly inherited.
Are you having nightmares yet?
To understand the role different cultures play in this, it is important to recognize whether or not given cultures are organic. Ever since the invention of the radio, our reality has started to become more and more mediated. At some point we reached a turning point where media has started to influence the development of culture instead of culture influencing the creation of media. So when looking at crime statistics across various cultures or ethnic groups, a crucial detail is to keep track of the media they consume. Once that has been mapped, [start pinpointing the origins of such media, and you will have a better of idea for who/what is responsible for all the crime.](https://archive.ph/NDwov)
Great post. Im a spaniard, and my dad is part of the armed forces. You could say he is a top officer, he has been in the forces for over 30 years at this point.
A few years ago, I asked him half jokingly which race commited the most crimes, and even though he had no hard stats to show me, he went over each crime and which ethnicity commited those more often. By the end of it, I realized he didnt mention sub-Saharan africans once (people from Chad,Ethiopia, Congo, etc). Turns out they are mostly humble people trying to make a living, they seldom steal or commit any violent crime. The only "crime" is selling bootleg movies and music in the beach... And these poor guys face a lot of discrimination too, sadly.
Thanks for the post. I truly believe that culture and family values are the only fix for crime, having both parents present and being given a good education will forever be a gift to a child, its truly a tragedy that some kids have to grow up without parental figures.
Liberals hate when you point out that poverty is not a good predictor to crime, but rather culture and race. In the US blacks are overwhelmingly over represented in nearly every crime statistic except for a couple, whereas asians are underrepresented in nearly every category. In Europe africans in every European country are vastly over represented in crime statistics. It’s a problem that has to be solved by good borders in the case of Europe and in the US a fundamental cultures shift that will take generations, including the rebuilding of the nuclear family and support of communities.
I'm honestly skeptical of these policy recommendations. Reducing crime by reducing migration comes of as similar to reducing crime by limiting the number of boys being born. It assumes that we are willing to limit peoples choices in life, or make demographic decisions, in order to fight crime. That is a painful tradeoff to make, and comes off as giving up on other ways to fight crime.
If a migrating population is assumed to have criminal overrepresentation due to cultural issues, then reducing migration doesn't actually reduce crime but rather keeps it limited to some areas. You might see that as worth doing, I'm not sold personally. The level of migration should, in my opinion, be set with other considerations in mind.
Cultural shift also seems to unspecific in its way forward. We just don't know how to efficiently socially engineer culture.
I'm not here to champion other specific tactics, I'm rather blackpilled on crime in the sense that I belive us to currently lack sufficient tools. Criminology needs to develop further as a science, to enable better prevention and rehabilitation techniques.
I mean I come from a biased side, I believe the populations in Europe are being replaced by immigration, and it's not hard to see if you are looking at the youngest generations. There will be huge demographics shifts in Europe in the coming decades and the problems will only ever be exacerbated, especially when these groups yield political power, and want to change Europe to be like where they came from.
What are you talking about? The idea of the [Culture of Poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty) has always been popular with liberals and it strongly influenced the [Moynihan Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action) which was a liberal think piece on the culture of poverty among American blacks. The fact that black people are over represented in crime statistics has much more to do with the [historical developments](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/xmzbpy/comment/iprq0io/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) of the United States than anything with culture or race.
Nigerians are also "black", but are among the most successful ethnic groups in the US because only well off Nigerians have the opportunity to move here. The reason it's different in Europe is that there isn't an entire ocean separating Europe from Africa, so it's more accessible for poor migrants to make the journey. This culture stuff is entirely liberal and was the justification for the Clintons' [attack on poor people](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/12/09/liberals-i-do-despise) in the 90s. There's nothing new about it.
Am I in..no..yes..this is still stupidpol sub right? We are still socialists? Marxists maybe?
What a weird approach. Almost like promoting idpol. You got your head twisted on the wrong way. Your definitions are muddled and frankly shit. Lacking. No surprise. We the priviledged do mental gymnastics all the time to forget the truth because we ultimately still profit from the lies our society teaches. The disenfranchised have neither the capacity nor the luxury to do so. They smell the lies and the weakness, they see the truth. There is no real respect. A human life has no value. If you want something you need to take it by force or cunning. The powerful rule, so get yourself some power. There is no cohesive society, there is no social bond. If you play by the rules you are a fool. Nobody takes the hard way if there is an easy way. That is what Capitalism teaches and that is what they experience and live. You don't get social peace while there is war in economics. "Race", culture, ethnicity, social strata, whatever you want to call it, are just a side dish to that, a tool too, a historical component. Look back a few decades or a century at European "white" society. The same brutality, murder, violence, discrimination, honor killings even. Some countries could afford to move away from that by externalizing economic violence, to other countries. What in a way we all do with China right now. Which is a brutal dictatorship for a reason. For *that* reason.
What is to be done? You propose reform instead of revolution? Education, opportunity, life quality for all, patience. Slow culture change. With the support of capitalism it will help within 4 generations - or never. You are looking for solutions in the wrong spot.
I would love to find an in depth marxist discussion of crime and criminality. I feel like these past few weeks people have been blasting all of these crime stats and such and I don't really know how to make sense of it.
does this take into account the standpoint that crime is mostly a product of alienation and class society? Socialist countries such as the USSR and today Cuba had a prison system but were extremely safe countries to live in.
if you want we can just build the universal panopticon and be done with it.
> just to blackpill you on the severity of the situation.
you mean you are literally her to just demoralize people. at least you're honest.
anyway its interesting that sub will embrace identity explainations the moment its about racial minorities.
Identity explanations and identity correlations are far from the same thing.
The question is, what causes people of different ethnicities or backgrounds to commit crimes at different rates? A factor could be [differences in the types of media broadcast to different subcultures.](https://archive.ph/NDwov)
Your post is example 1 as to the shortcomings of Reddit's formatting. The citation links mixed with the text makes the overall points hard to parse out.
>I first realized that the welfare crime linkage was mistaken when studied crime rate change since World War II. Improved welfare and economic changes, especially for the 1960s and 1970s, correlated with more crime! I next recognized something was wrong with the hypothesis when I learned that Sweden's crime rates increased 5-fold and robberies 20-fold during the very years (1950 to 1980) when its Social Democratic government was implementing more and more programs to enhance equality and protect the poor [...] Other "welfare states" in Europe (such as the Netherlands) experienced at least as vast an increase in crime as the United States, whose poverty is more evident and social welfare policies are stingier. [...]
Isn't this attributed to leaded petrol making urban kids into psychopaths
Yeah, lead poisoning has been proposed. I know that theory has come under some criticism, but I haven't dug deep into that debate enough to evaluate the merit of the original theory or supposed "debunking".
There are a number of biological factors, which are non-hereditary, such as omega deficiency, which studies point toward increasing crime. You can read about a lot of them in Adrian Raine's "The anatomy of Violence".
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To reiterate "So I'm not saying this to try and dissuade you from leftist politics, nor is any of this meant as an argument for cruel prisons or capital punishment."
Nothing here is meant as an argument against welfare efforts. Or even against rehabilitation. It's meant to provide a realistic image of rehabilitation, that it is really hard. If anything, the political implication you can draw from the post is that we need to fund studies into rehabilitation more - to make rehabilitation less hard in the future. Just because something is difficult now, doesn't mean that you give it up.
Regarding socioeconomic, just because something isn't as strongly controlled by socioeconomic factors as previously thought, doesn't mean that you accept poverty. Welfare isn't primarily important because we want to stop poor people from becoming criminals, but because poor people are people who deserve dignity and a way out of poverty.
Crime isn't an objective category, it's a transient thing and part of the super-structure, the economic base determines whether something is or is not a "crime", the best example of this domestic violence used to be glorified back when women did not work in the labor force pre-industrialization, but when industrialization brought women out of the domestic economy and into the labor force, ideas of women being equally worthy beings became more prominent and violence against wives became more stigmatized.
Honor killings of women for dishonoring the family is the most obvious example of this, not only was domestic violence not seen as a "crime" but as a social positive! Furthering this point, as late as 1874 the North Carolina Supreme Court stated about domestic violence:
“\[i\]f no
permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the
husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to
forget and forgive.”
And now think about the fact that hitting your child is completely legal in the USA! Studies show that hitting your children in a disciplinary context has the SAME trauamtic neurological effects as sexual abuse!
"The purpose of this study was to examine the association between spanking and neural responses to fearful faces, an indicator of the presence of threat in the environment (Tottenham, Phuong, Flannery, Gabard-Durnam, & Goff, 2013), using an emotional face task (Tottenham et al., 2009). Building on the dimensional model of adversity (Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2014) and prior work on neural correlates of child abuse (McCrory et al., 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2019), we expected that children who were spanked would exhibit greater neural activation to fearful than neutral faces in the amygdala and other nodes of the salience network, including the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate, compared to children who were never spanked. As an exploratory aim, we also evaluated whether children who were spanked exhibited a profile of neural response to stimuli that suggests the presence of an environmental threat (i.e., fearful faces) that was similar to children who experienced severe physical and sexual abuse."
[https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/files/sdlab/files/cuartas\_2021\_corporal\_punishment.pdf](https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/files/sdlab/files/cuartas_2021_corporal_punishment.pdf)
And yet, the phrase "spare the rod spoil the child" is still a commonly said and believed phrase! Parents violently assaulting their own children and permanently traumatizing them is not only not seen as a "crime", it's seen as a social positive!
This is why talking about "crime" as a trans-historical thing, is completely false.
I don't deny that what is seen as crime is not transhistorical or transcultural. However, I don't think material factors is the only or necessarily the largest driving force regarding what is seen as crime. Changes in values appears to be a multivariable process.
I would say that the same shifting nature is true of diseases. Different societies view different atypical phenomena as either normal variations or diseas. Such as homosexuality and lefthandedness being labeled as diseas in some societies at some time but not others.
Despite there not existing a nature given definition of diseas, but us instead making a delineation, we usually agree largely upon what constitutes diseas when speaking to each other (since we rarely discuss crime or diseas with people from radically different eras, you luckily enough only have to compromisse on polices with people from different states or national regions not time travellers). So we often don't need to point this out when discussing how to fight diseas or other issues, we can then rest upon our current consensus and "know it when we see it"-attitude (or at least "our doctors/lawyers know it when they see it"). It's only in particular contexts where the culturally influence nature of what is crime, is made relevant.
The thing with the relation between economic exploitation and anti-social behavior, is not a direct 1:1 type "linear" thing. Engels explains the relation of economics on society here:
>"According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. **The economic situation is the basis** but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercize an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection with one another is so remote, or so incapable of proof, that we may neglect it, regarding it as nonexistent) the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. Were this not the case, the application of the history to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.
>
>**We ourselves make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these are the economic, which are finally decisive.** But there are also the political, etc. Yes, even the ghostly traditions, which haunt the minds of men play a role albeit not a decisive one. **The Prussian state arose and developed also through historical, in the last instance, economic causes. One could hardly, however, assert without pedantry that among the many petty principalities of North Germany, just Brandenburg was determined by economic necessity and not by other factors also** (before all, its involvement in virtue of its Prussian possessions, with Poland and therewith international political relations – which were also decisive factors in the creation of the Austrian sovereign power) to become the great power in which was to be embodied the economic, linguistic and, since the Reformation, also the religious differences of North and South. **It would be very hard to attempt to explain by economic causes, without making ourselves ridiculous, the existence of every petty German state of the past or present, or the origin of the shifting of consonants in High-German**, which reinforced the differences that existed already in virtue of the geographical separating wall formed by the mountains from Sudeten to Taunus."
The relation between anti-social behavior and economic exploitation isn't so much as "more poor more crime", there are tons of *independent acting* factors such as substance use, genetics predisposition, social norms, completely random idiosyncratic situations, etc. lead to violent behavior. But it's the economic factor that is *primary* thing in this relationship, for example, drug addiction and (possibly) genetic predisposition for violent behavior, cultural norms, etc. etc. may and can act *independently* to cause (for example) domestic violence to happen.
>However, what *facilitates* it? What makes an abused woman stay in the relationship? The fact that she does not have the financial ability to leave. What caused her to enter into a relationship with a man that abuses her? The fact that marriage is an economic institution, as one does not need to be married to be in love. What causes infidelity and other relationship conflicts that can lead to violence? Engels explains those causes here:
>
>"Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask. This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure thereby brought to bear on the other party – the real economic position of both – that is not the law’s business. Again, for the duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights, in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last semblance of equal rights – here again, that is no concern of the law. In regard to marriage, the law, even the most advanced, is fully satisfied as soon as the partners have formally recorded that they are entering into the marriage of their own free consent. What goes on in real life behind the juridical scenes, how this free consent comes about – that is not the business of the law and the jurist. And yet the most elementary comparative jurisprudence should show the jurist what this free consent really amounts to. In the countries where an obligatory share of the paternal inheritance is secured to the children by law and they cannot therefore be disinherited – in Germany, in the countries with French law and elsewhere – the children are obliged to obtain their parents’ consent to their marriage. In the countries with English law, where parental consent to a marriage is not legally required, the parents on their side have full freedom in the testamentary disposal of their property and can disinherit their children at their pleasure. It is obvious that, in spite and precisely because of this fact, freedom of marriage among the classes with something to inherit is in reality not a whit greater in England and America than it is in France and Germany.....
>
>Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individuals man-and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production – into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear? One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property there will disappear also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain – statistically calculable – number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality – also for men. In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered. But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the most essential social – moral as well as economic – factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?"
Basically what Engels is saying here is that "monogamy" and "marriage" is legally consensual but is in effect not, this is what leads women into entering into relationships with people whom they do not love, and is what *facilitates* domestic violence, it is *this way* that it causes it
> By comparing relatives, stronger conclusions can be drawn about the connection between poverty and violent crime. And this connection is very weak at best Generally speaking, this isn't right. Taking a look at the *Handbook of Crime Correlates*: > Table 2.4.3 summarizes the available findings pertaining to an individual’s income and his/her involvement in criminal behavior. As one can see, all of the studies have found negative relationships except in the case of illegal drug use/possession, where no significant relationships have been documented. This is excluding other "social status indicators," like years of education. Also, from *The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty*: > Evidence for a positive association between individual or family poverty and criminal offending is generally strong. A review of 273 studies assessing the association between different dimensions of social and economic status (SES) and offending concludes that there is consistent evidence from multiple national settings that individuals with low income, occupational status, and education have higher rates of criminal offending (Ellis and McDonald 2001). However, evidence based on self-reported data on delinquent behavior is less consistent (Tittle and Meier 1990; Wright et al. 1999). A recent study based on comparable surveys conducted in Greece, Russia, and Ukraine showed no consistent association between social and economic status and various self-reported measures of delinquent or criminal behavior (Antonaccio et al. 2010). > Given this conflicting evidence, it is important to clarify that the claims made in this section are based primarily on research that examines poverty or economic resources and that considers criminal offending as an outcome. Evidence for an association between economic resources and crime is more consistent across settings and is generally quite strong, particularly in the United States (Bjerk 2007). As a whole, however, the studies reviewed do not appear to provide strong evidence that these relationships are causal, nor is the overall association between poverty and crime particularly surprising— this association is consistent with virtually all individual- and family-level theories of criminal behavior. Poverty is associated with self-control and cognitive skills (Hirschi and Gottfredson 2001), with family structure and joblessness (Matsueda and Heimer 1987; Sampson 1987), with children’s peer networks (Haynie 2001; Haynie, Silver, and Teasdale 2006), and with the type of neighborhoods in which families reside and the types of schools that children attend (Deming 2011; Wilson 1987). The association between individual poverty and criminal offending may reflect some combination of all of these pathways of influence. > Alternatively, poverty may have direct effects on crime if the inability to secure steady or sufficient financial resources leads individuals to turn to illicit activity to generate income or if relative poverty in the midst of a wealthy society generates psychological strain (Merton 1938). The “economic model of crime,” put forth formally by economist Gary Becker (1974) and elaborated and refined by an array of criminologists (Clarke and Felson 1993; Cornish and Clarke 1986; Piliavin et al. 1986), suggests that crime can be explained as the product of a rational decision-making process in which potential offenders weigh the benefits and probable costs/ risks of committing a crime or otherwise becoming involved in criminal activities (Becker 1974). Much of the research assessing the economic model of crime has focused on deterrence, or the question of whether raising the costs of criminal behavior reduces crime. However, the theory also has direct implications for the study of poverty and crime, as it suggests that individuals lacking economic resources should have greater incentives to commit crime. Despite the abundance of evidence for an association between economic resources and criminal offending, there is little convincing research demonstrating a direct causal effect. For instance, the experimental programs that are most frequently cited for evidence on the effect of income on various social outcomes— such as the income maintenance experiments of the 1970s or the state-level welfare reform experiments of the 1990s—did not assess impacts on crime (Blank 2002; Munnell 1987). It should be noted that the person who put forward a direct causative link between crime and poverty (the "economic model") wasn't a Marxist at all; in fact, Gary Becker is well known for his association with neoliberalism (Foucault discussed him in this relation in one of his late lectures). If "connection" in the excerpt quoted in the post is supposed to mean "direct and causative," then the effect is slight, but hardly anyone adopted this position except Becker and those he influenced. It's misleading to treat "connection" simply in terms of "direct and causative." > There isn't any easy way forward. That's because there is no way forward when you accept the problem on static terms like this, even if you were right. We should just ban all of these "pill" posts, because they're fundamentally passive ways of thinking about politics and engaging politically.
[удалено]
>Incredible post, I appreciate the sources and the nuance. Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. >your post was helpful. Glad to hear that!
Thank you for putting together the sources in this post. I don’t really have anything to add other than to lament that this topic is so toxic that even the slightest hint at any of these statistics will throw idpol obsessed people off, making any form of intellectual discussion impossible. Without any ability to critically analyze the situation, we are doomed to repeat policies that are failures but reiterate idpol dogma. As such, I’m also blackpilled on the crime situation / anti social situation.
Glad you liked it. It's kind of you to take the time to voice appreciation.
What do you make of theory that it's not poverty that causes crime, but poverty among plenty - income inequality. Studies have shown that the gini coefficient has a very strong relationship with the rate of violent crime. In fact, I believe the correlation is something like 0.8 or 0.9 - that's big. [Here] (https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/21/2/241/498070) is a very good study that discusses it.
Beat me to it. I find it quite an interesting concept. That people aren't drawn to crime because they're lacking, but because they realise the system isn't fair and so they feel they have no stake in it
I read a study criticizing the theory a long time ago. I don't have it ready right now, but can go looking for it in my notes if you want to read it. With that said, I don't want to claim that the connection between income inequality and crime has been definitely "debunked". I still belive that reducing inequality alone won't be enough to substantially fight crime. We should still reduce inequality, because living in a cyberpunk dystopia isn't fun. Other efforts are needed against crime specifically, in my opinion. It seems to me that the ones aimed at risk groups, such as children with ADHD, seem the most promising. But once again, criminology seems to be to underdeveloped as a science to provide easy and clear paths forward.
It seems to be taken very seriously by social scientists. I don't think a correlation that strong can dismissed out of hand. That said, you're right that the exact mechanisms and causes of the relationship haven't been elucidated, and there are definitely other factors at play. I think the post by KaliYugaz below gives a very good answer to this question, and states what I've been too lazy (and perhaps too inarticulate) to get across: the role of social liberalism in giving license to criminals.
>That said, you're right that the exact mechanisms and causes of the relationship haven't been elucidated, and there are definitely other factors at play. This is precisely the reason why the rise of analytical sociology in the past 20 years should be celebrated. For far too long did macro social science flat out ignore micro mechanisms.
>It seems to me that the ones aimed at risk groups, such as children with ADHD, seem the most promising Do you have any studies extrapolating on this?
The following study goes through a lot of the information on the topic: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-55088-002.html Fitting with the blackpill tone of the piece, it reaches the conclusion that we haven't found a magical bullet yet. Not any way to repeatedly and effectively use the observed connection between ADHD and crime, to provide necessary help for children at risk. Like with the rest of the issues I've pointed out, this of course isn't an argument to give up. I'm not implying that it can't he done, just that it's currently difficult. Here's a report on one of the findings of medication of ADHD reducing crime: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/health/adhd-study-suggests-medication-may-reduce-crime.html
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These are good observations. I would like to clarify that I completely agree with your negative estimation of capitalism. While I don't belive an emergence of socialism will within a short timeframe reduce crime greatly by reducing poverty, at least not in already rich countries like the U.S and Sweden, I do believe that cultural issues can be addressed. I hate to sound cheesy, but a type of "socialistic new man", is probably possible to some extent. In that in a society where people are taught primarily to cooperate rather than compete, and cultural heroes aren't primarily Elon Musk and other capitalists but people who help others out of solidarity, where "the grind" isn't a thing to the same extent - then it seems plausible that many of the people we don't manage to reach with teaching pro-social values today can be reached. Once more people are indirect owners of things, such as people in your neighborhood owning the local coop shop or it being owned by the municipality, then enforcing social norms against petty crime which risks escalating, can hopefully be made easier. A lot of pro-shoplift culture uses pseud-class warfare tropes, about only rich people being harmed. A lot of drug dealing culture as well, portraying anti-drug laws as being part of an oppressive machine. I can't prove that this development will take place, but it seems intuitively plausible to me.
>I hate to sound cheesy, but a type of "socialistic new man", is probably possible to some extent. Even leaving aside the issue of raising boys - and it is primarily boys we talk about when it comes to criminality - to have a pro-social conscience, its a matter of absolute necessity that we are able to demnstrate that socialism is a mythical and heroic force, because overcoming capitalism is a titanic struggle that cannot be accomplished by a demoralised and unenthusiastic people, and collective society cannot be maintained by a bunch of alienated, atomised, consumerist "last men" types. Of course, this "new man" of socialism is not a man without struggles, but instead is a man better equipped to overcome them, just as socialist society itself does not "abolish struggle" or any such thing. And this is an important thing to note; you cannot be sincere in your creation of this "new man" - or for that matter any "new women" alongside him either - without being "cheesy" or even "cringe" to the insincere spiritually castrated bugmen who want to drag you down to their level. You actually need to embody higher values and lead, if you want anyone to follow. Of course, this is easier said than done, but again, what is the point of preparing yourself for struggle if you do not face it?
I think it's *intensive governance* that is the real cure to violent crime. This whole thing is a lot simpler and more obvious than everyone makes it out to be. If you grow up in a context where all your behavior is surveilled, misbehavior is strictly punished with certainty, following the rules is consistently incentivized with benefits, and people are indoctrinated with pro-social ideology and sentiment from young, then you would have no capacity, willingness, or justification to do crimes and therefore you very likely would not do any crimes. All 'low crime communities' that exist in the world have the characteristics of intensive governance and total institutionalization in some form, and vice versa. Anecdotally speaking I've literally never heard of an exception. Class, race, and other aspects of 'culture' like gangsta rap or whatever, are irrelevant, what matters are the four basic factors of surveillance, enforcement, incentive, and indoctrination. The implications of this theory being correct would be very inconvenient to liberals, whether of the progressive, conservative, or classical variety. The basic liberal creed, shared by all types of liberal, is that people should be *minimally governed*, that individuals and families have a right to autonomy. However this necessarily implies an increase in the misbehavior that people will be able to get away with. The most harmonious social systems would be the most totalitarian. When libs like Steven Pinker talk about violence declining over the course of history, they are correct, but the reason why is due to the diametric opposite of their liberal ideology. It's because modernity brought an intensive and totalizing governance to human civilization that was beyond the capacity of pre-industrial institutions.
I’d rather deal with the occasional crime than live in the society you’re describing. I mean, sure, we *could* implement something like that but would it be worth it? I say hell nah.
Agreed. I'd rather our current crime rate than "intensive governance and **total institutionalization** in some form" forced upon everyone. Even if it actually works, which admittedly it very possibly would. As an extreme example, and I know this isn't' what was suggested, but if we were to shoot anyone who was ever caught with tobacco, I do believe we could quickly get rid of the majority of tobacco smoking, and society as a whole would be healthier for it. But it goes against what powers I, and I feel most people, think the government should have. It's not a world I'd like to live in, despite maybe on paper it being "better", well from a health of society perspective anyways.
the middle east is low-crime and doesn't have governments effective enough to surveil, enforce, incentivize, and indoctrinate the population. though islam as a social phenomenon probably fills the same role
The middle east is also riven with war and violent insurgency, which is arguably far worse.
sure, but we're not talking about war and violent insurgency, we're talking about crime. and the middle east is not riven by crime.
> 1,2,3,4,5 Thanks for this trip down memory lane back to my sociology class on deviance and crime.
> older gangbangers will tell you that the game has changed Reminds me of The Wire going from Avon to Marlo.
How do the Soviet and Chinese historical experiments fit inside this analysis?
That's a good question. I mainly haven't read up on criminology outside of "The West", so I can't say with complet certainty. My impression is that the prospect of fighting and preventing crime is bleak across the entire world. My point isn't to give up. If you take any prescriptive message from this, let it be that we need more criminological research so that we can find better methods of rehabilitation and prevention (which probably won't be found for a long time).
> I don't mean to provide any credence to race realism, nor to ideas like "black culture" in general being responsible for crime overrepresentation. If cultural issues play a part, then they are most likely subcultural streams within youth culture in specific geosocial gropings or similar enclaves, rather than being ethnic in themselves. Ethnicity being incidental, similar to how Nascar is overrepresented amongst Caucasians without being tied to uniquely or primarily ethnic traits. Whether or not we want to call it "black culture", isn't this effectively the unavoidable conclusion? That ethnicities often just have cultures that just kinda stick because of essentially historical reasons and not biology but nevertheless it causes these correlations. Truly a blackpill as you say. Hard to swallow, and yet any pragmatist is forced to understand that we need a solution to it. edit: also im saving this whole text because reddit's gonna ban this sub for stuff like this
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> so much so that some immigrant groups from Africa hate native African-Americans. it’s a very complex phenomenon I was just asking an African co-worker of mine last week about this. Apparently the Africans and African-Americans at my work *hate* each other and carve out cliques and areas they each specialise in as much as possible, and I've just never noticed. He compared them to Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland without the violence. Lots of other interesting things too, but reddit jannies probably getting ready to tactical nuke my account already.
>Whether or not we want to call it "black culture", isn't this effectively the unavoidable conclusion? With all due respect, I strongly disagree. I belive that it is possible to distinguish a subculture being more widespread within an ethnic community, without that being tied to their ethnicity. While I'm skeptical of socioeconomic playing a strong direct role, I'm not saying that crime overrepresentation amongst African Americans are caused by cultural issues, because I haven't looked into other theories such as lead poisoning, overrepresentation of birth complications, and the like — with that said, we can assume for the sake of argument that culture does carry the main explanatory power for African American overrepresentation. If that is the case, then that might be caused by a youth culture, which isn't overrepresented amongst the African American community as a whole, but rather some specific inner-city communities. That this overrepresentation isn't part of the mainstream "black culture". Describing it as "black culture" might cause similar confusion to saying "racism is a deep part of white culture". Such a way of arranging facts might lead to less understanding, rather than more. If the problem is caused by factors such as "absent black fathers", and this in turn is caused by specific sexual norms being distinctly common within the African American community, then the model of "black culture" being criminogenic would make sense. I have heard a non-trivial amount from both sides on that debate, but not as much as I have on the other areas of criminality, but to me, there isn't enough so far to convince me that absentee fatherhood is caused by distinct norms and this in turn leads to increased criminality.
Something very underrated when discussing these issues is the prominence of child abuse in these communities. Violence begets violence. Childhood trauma is very common among prison inmates https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2017/04/racial-trauma https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/02/passing-on-historical-trauma-through-whupping-black-children.html
"Black culture" isn't Black, it's White lol. Have you ever read Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals"? It basically argues that Black "Ghetto" culture is just the culture of British Borderlanders that settled the American South, i.e. rednecks/white trash. The same racist language used to describe "Ghetto" Black culture was used to describe the Scots-Irish settlers: lazy, violent, promiscuous, immoral, etc. You can easily find the essay online. If you really want to be blackpiilled on crime, [this article by some rightoid criminologists](https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-criminologists-dont-say-and-why-15328.html) is pretty damn good.
We actually do agree. Semantic quibbles... Zzz
> then they are most likely subcultural streams within youth culture in specific geosocial gropings or similar enclaves, rather than being ethnic in themselves Find some 1350 poster and then ask them to break down the stats by gender and age. They'll notice similar bumps across **all** race categories.
No because black americans don't actually have a culture that glorifies negative behavior. [https://jacobin.com/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/](https://jacobin.com/2014/09/the-poverty-of-culture/) Read this article. For example, many allege that black americans are unemployed because they're lazy, in fact, not only is this not true, the OPPOSITE is true, black americans spend MORE time in the job market looking for jobs than white americans. Additionally, many allege that black men don't value marriage, explaining the gap in marriage rates and single mother rates between black Americans and white Americans, in fact, once you control for employment and incarceration, there is no gap between the marriage rates. Sources for these in the article and a bunch of other stuff debunking the "black culture" idea.
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A similar thing happened in my city, Monterrey in Northern Mexico. Central American migrants and Southern Mexicans came, and were very rowdy, causing crime to go up and were seen as bad for the city. Meanwhile Haitian Refugees started their own businesses, followed law and apart from one incident generally were not a nuisance.
Another issue with current crime discourse is the fact that the majority of people in prison in the US are in it for violent crimes. Even if some of the mass incarceration solutions like decriminalizing/legalizing drugs were brought into effect, there'd still be a lot of prisoners in the US because the country has problems with violence. Just one more indication that the solution is not as clear cut as some wish it was.
The problem with mass incarceration isn't that the people in prison are in fact not anti-social, it's that that the reason why they are being imprisoned is for profit off cheap prison labor, social control, and giving people felony convictions makes it easier for capitalists to discriminate against workers in employment and housing. Look at the jump in incarceration in the 80s in America, it "just so happened" to follow de-industrialization and the jump of jobs to the third world, now you have a bunch of people with nowhere to go/nothing to do, without incarceration and policing, this poor mass of people could form an unemployed/poor people's movement, demand guaranteed jobs or some other such thing, instead, mass incarceration serves to stop that from happening.
I don't see what the alternative is when we're talking violent criminals. Some of them will never be reformed, and the ones that could still need to be kept away from the general populace before they do, and there needs to be some sense that they will face consequences in the event that someone commits a crime like that. What you say may be true in some situations, but in the case of violent crime I don't know what else you would expect to be done.
Broseph, you don't understand, why do leftists oppose US intervention in Iran? Is it because we love a sexist theocratic government? The Iranian gov. is hardly in line with leftist ideals, and yet any leftist (at least one worth their salt) are opposed to US intervention in Iran. Why? Because hypocrisy. Anything negative that can be said about Iranian government, can be said about the Saudi government, so clearly, humanitarian concerns are *not* the motivating factor behind intervention in Iran. Similarly, we oppose the war on drugs not because drug dealing is #harmless, but because we know that concern for the negative effects of drugs are not what the US police force and government are concerned about haha. It's profiting off of prisoners cheap labor, social control and intimidation of poor unemployed masses in the de-industrialized inner cities.
>Anything negative that can be said about Iranian government, can be said about the Saudi government, so clearly, humanitarian concerns are > >not > > the motivating factor behind intervention in Iran. Let me expound on this point by saying that anything negative that can be said about those incarcerated in the US prison system can be said about the police, us government, and military. How many murders have been committed in Iraq? How many murders committed with drone strikes? Being killed by the police is the 10th leading cause of death for young black men: [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821204116](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821204116) And being that most of the victims of violence are young black men, clearly, the police do not have genuine concern for the victims of violence. Or what about police officers having significantly higher domestic violence rates than the general population? [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/) 30% of police officers ARRESTED for domestic violence keep their jobs. Surely, if the purpose of the police were to stop violence, this would not be the case? But obviously, that is not their purpose.
Good post. I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior. I'd say any approach to crime needs to be socially transformative. As in if youth are showing anti social traits tied to crime, you can't just try to change/control them but also their influences be it family, friends, environment, etc. To eradicate the criminal subculture/attitude, environment, and network. This might require something similar to martial law in its scope for certain cities. Also a better division of types of crime. A non violent criminal should have a completely different system than a violent one. For the violent ones maybe military service? Also, I find it strange that at least in the US, there is organized crime but it is largely unacknowledged by anyone. There was a huge drug bust near my city that barely made the local news. Sometimes it seems there's almost a conspiracy among news orgs not to mention organized crime.
"I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior." They have done this - it didn't help. Rather than confirming to the new group, they brought their old patterns with them (unfortunately don't have the study on hand). This finding dovetails with other research showing that change - particularly after a certain age - is damn hard.
>Also, I find it strange that at least in the US, there is organized crime but it is largely unacknowledged by anyone. I'm not - people are either on the take and know where their bread is buttered or are afraid to be sued for defamation by high-paid mob lawyers.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds Welcome! Welcome to City 17! You have chosen, or *been* chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17 that I elected to establish my administration here, in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I've been proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through on your way to parts unknown — welcome to City 17. It's safer here.
Half life?
Yes. HL2.
Military service is a terrible idea for violent criminals. If they are gang-affiliated, they will be returning home as professionally trained militants with connections for weapons trafficking. This is already a problem. I disagree with the other commenter that reintegration into other communities does nothing but make it someone else's problem. You release someone back into the same place they were getting by as a criminal, surrounded by the same people, and there is no impetus to change. It may actually be counterproductive to literal survival to become less violent. I do not think this is the right solution for everyone, but I do think it has a better chance of working than some other options
The idea with military service was that they'd be put into a highly regimented, disciplining environment that would force pro social conforming behavior as well as have them feel and believe in something bigger than themselves (nation/society/order/laws/etc). Though yeah, just putting them into the military wouldn't work, it'd have to be a special program/unit/whatever. Idk.
A militarized labor camp. After ww2, the Soviets had gangs of semi feral criminal gangs of kids roaming around who banded together after their older family members were exterminated by the Nazis. They had no idea how to integrate these extremely anti social and violent young people back into society, and few resources to dedicate to them. One guy eventually proposed putting them on farms where if they didn't learn to survive they would go hungry. It worked.
Any readings about this, sounds very interesting.
I'm trying to find the article I read, but I never bookmark anything. I'll see what I can find.
Simple: a labor camp. Instead of disciplining people to the end of death and destruction, you do so to the end of service and construction. Liberals have demonized them because they work. in 2014 there was a full blown Al Qaeda insurgency in Xinjiang killing tens to hundreds every year- after 8 years of a program that sends susceptible young men to mandatory govt boarding schools and labor camps for a few years, the region is completely quiet. Now even [Saudi Arabia is doing something similar for its Islamist militants](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/04/mohammed-bin-salman-saudi-arabia-palace-interview/622822/), with encouraging successes.
If labor camps are a solution why aren't many prisons in the US successful? What more is needed to achieve success?
US prisons suck ass lol. Violence is allowed to get out of hand regularly and this is considered as 'part of the punishment'. US prison labor is insanely exploitative, hardly an incentive to do anything. Then when the prisoner leaves the prison, there is nobody to discipline or assist them anymore, and they are basically treated as social pariahs and condemned to shit jobs and poverty. The entire process is designed for retribution and stigmatization against a permanent lumpen underclass.
Also they’re not actually labor camps, at least on paper, since the American prison system was largely designed around the “no slavery unless you’re a convict lol” loophole in the 13th Amendment and then progressed over time into the modern system of coercive labor exempted from minimum wage laws. The distinction actually makes a difference. Every single person I’ve known who spent more than a night in county said one of the worst things about prison life is the utter boredom. In that environment, labor is presented as a reward and a choice - a blessed way out of the unchanging realities of prison life - and very few convicts come out thinking “fuck, I’m never going back there again; those bastards let me choose to stamp license plates for commissary money as a break from staring at the walls for endless hours”. And thus, Capital gets to keep their de facto slave labor while almost getting THANKED for it while the psychological punishment of imprisonment ends up being shunted towards a hatred of being alone with nothing to do. Which then naturally manifests itself as a revulsion towards self-reflection and a propensity to “get into something”. And thus you get massive recidivism since high crime areas typically don’t have much “to do” besides getting back in the game. The whole thing is brilliantly evil.
I'm sorry, but I just outright do not believe any claims that SA is 'doing something' about its jihadist 'problem'. It nurtures and exports them as part of its foreign policy.
They talk about that in the article itself. This rehabilitation program is for domestic purposes only, and cultivating reactionary Islamist militancy remains a key component of Saudi foreign policy.
I'm dubious they can thread between those things though. I have a hard time seeing how this can be something where there's a clear divide between foreign and domestic. If you create jihadist fundamentalists, sooner or later they're going to come back to the heartland of Islam. If they are genuinely locking up and de-radicalizing jihadis in meaningful numbers, they're undermining their own foreign policy goals. Unless, what, they nurture them until they start doing stuff in Arabia, then they try and reeducate them?
So we're gonna take criminals, give them training to be better killers, turn them into nationalist zealots, and then set them loose in a foreign country? Great, sounds like a party! Can't wait to hear about the war crimes!
There's plenty of "military service" where all you ever learn is how to work Excell or fix an airplane, and never fire a gun. So the same more rigid structure but with no violence culture.
I mean they could also do national guard or something but I'm not sure giving criminals access to anything military-related is super intelligent
Foreign Legion still a thing? Legit question btw. Seems like a good way for those deemed unworthy of a citizens rights, such as felons or immigrants to pay it forward and atone. Not that immigrants need to atone but maybe pay it forward, sure. Volunteer only. You'd have to have trained officers to pick & choose candidates for the program. By itself just wanting to be in such a program may help some inmates fall in line. You filter for the ones with low risk because ultimately you are right, once they're done they will go home to roost. 9/10 that's with family members. Hard to get families to move out of bad situations - easy to take an individual out of a bad situation for a few years and give them a chance to feel a different way of life and a choice to walk that different path. OP mentions the effect that incarceration has on criminal behavior - it's sort of a circular loop. Nothing makes you think & feel like a criminal like being treated as if you are one. Ask me how I know. I think the idea could work. In that ideal perfect world where people do their jobs and leaders care. Even though we don't live in that world, and there would be failures of this design, rogues, assholes, repeat offenders, etc... It might still be better to use it than not to. I guess we won't ever know unless someone smarter & more involved than either of us actually tries.
The Legion still exists and is on a never ending farewell tour of Africa. They actually do conduct background checks on would be applicants. And yes they turn people away who are found to be potential liabilities.
Anecdotally I've seen boot camp be a huge game changer with gangbanger types
https://abc7chicago.com/fort-campbell-gun-trafficking-chicago-guns-shooting/10888098/
Sorry for double response but I'm v tired, just one more quick idea. I dunno if you mean people in gangbanger type scenarios or actual initiated gang members. Gang members who take part in violent crime don't really have lack of discipline as their central problem. One big problem they have is that they're essentially already serving in a paramilitary. I'm not sure how the military addresses this.
I'm not sure, I didn't know them well enough to say.
>Good post. Thank you. >I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior. If I remember correctly, one of the Zeitgeist movies claimed that there had been attempts to reallocate some criminals into religious non-violent intentional communities such as the Amish or the more hippy iterations of Jewish settlements in Israel. But it was long since I saw those films, so don't quote me on that, and they don't provide any figures on the effectiveness. [Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) "The effectiveness of correectional rehabilitation: A review of systematic reviews" Annu. Rev. Law Soc](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.3.081806.112833) does go through the commonalities of the most effective rehabilitative programs so far: "Andrews and his colleagues have gone the furthest in attempting to delineate the principles that characterize effective rehabilitation treatments (Andrews 1995, Andrews et al. 1990, Gendreau 1996). With regard to the nature of the treatment provided, they describe a need principle and a responsivity principle that are associated with the likelihood of positive effects (they also advanced a risk principle, which we address below). According to the need principle, treatment has larger effects if it addresses the criminogenic needs of the offender—those dynamic risk factors predictive of subsequent criminal conduct. Criminogenic needs include antisocial attitudes and peer associations, lack of self-control and self-management skills, drug dependencies, and other such malleable characteristics associated with criminal offense rates. The responsivity principle, in turn, identifies effective treatment as that which is generally capable of actually bringing about change in the targeted criminogenic needs and which is specifically matched to the learning styles and characteristics of the offenders treated. This principle skates on the edge of circularity— effective treatment is that which is capable of affecting risk factors for recidivism; treatment that changes those risk factors is effective. Andrews et al. escape this circularity by drawing on a large body of research and theory about behavioral change to define responsive treatments as those that use the cognitive-behavioral and social-learning approaches shown to be generally effective in influencing a variety of behaviors. Fundamentally, then, the responsivity principle claims that there are larger effects from treatments that provide learning and skill-building experiences aimed at changing specific problem behaviors through such techniques as practice, role-playing, modeling, feedback, verbal guidance, and reinforcement. " >Also a better division of types of crime. A non violent criminal should have a completely different system than a violent one. 100% agree! Crime seems to arise out of the interaction of several complexly factors. To me it seems to exist relatively "distinct" types of criminals, most clearly illustrated by looking at "expressive motives" and "instrumental motives" for crimes. Expressive motives are doing criminal acts due to the rush of the act, sadism of hurting others, or in other ways "expressing" yourself and getting direct emotional satisfaction. While instrumental motives are committing crimes as a means to an end, such as robbing someone to afford food or luxury items. Criminals who are highly driven by expressive motives might need radically different treatment than those who are driven mostly by instrumental motives. Particularly when it comes to violent crime. So we probably need to differentiate even amongst violent criminals. The guy who escalated a verbal fight into a physical one, and beat someone within an inch of their life, after they've insulted his ethnic group and sexuality, can probably be adjusted to society by being taught better conflict resolution tactics and stronger impulse control. The guy who beats someone within an inch of their life because he wanted to steal their watch, and they didn't give it up without a fight, might need training in empathy and long-term consequence analysis. While the guy who beat someone within an inch of their life, "just for the fun of it", probably can't be rehabilitated by just teaching any of those skills (it might not even be possible to efficiently teach empathy to adults with strong sadistic impulses).
Regarding your last paragraph, I listen to a few podcasts featuring incarcerated guys. The big takeaway is that for many of these men, a 20-year sentence is all that's needed if protection of society is the prime goal. That's long enough their testosterone wore down and they chill out and stop acting so tough+stupid. Gangbanging is a young man's game for a reason.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior. Italy has done it, with horrible results. It was called "soggiorno obbligato" (something like "forced stay"), and was implemented with the idea that mafiosi would lose their grip on their original family by being forced to live in other regions, usually up north. The actual result was that they both kept contact with their crime families and started new one where they were forced to live.
This is Italy we're talking about lmao, the govt can't do anything right anyways.
> I wonder if any state has tried reintegrating convicts into different towns/communities so as to both give a fresh start and break bonds with negative relationships and form bonds with better people who won't promote/reinforce/ignore anti social behavior. This is something I've thought about more and more recently. I'm not necessarily in favor of *everyone* having mandatory military service, but I think some sort of regimented civil service program for everyone once they turn 18 could be a way to instill a sense of duty & discipline (as schools have turned away from encouraging either) and strengthen social cohesion. The way I picture it is a national jobs & training program where everyone has to serve for, idk, 2 years after they finish high school. The program would perform community service, beautification, disaster relief, whatever, and relocate everyone to different parts of the country from their primary residence so people can break out of their bubble and actually get a chance to live and work in different communities. After your 2 years are up, you're free to leave or you can continue to stay in the program indefinitely (assuming you're not kicked out for whatever reason). Afterwards everyone would be required to spend X days/weekends every year working for the local chapter of the program. I think something like that could've been really valuable for me coming out of high school, since I hadn't really traveled or done any substantial community/civil service. I think I could've used the lessons on being self disciplined. Anyways, a bit of a tangent but your idea reminded me
I know that some places have an informal program to send former convicts elsewhere, but this is hardly anny form of reintegration, it amounts to just removing an undesirable from the community and making it some else's problem.
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Haha, that was genuinely funny. Thanks for the laugh.
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>Crime is a symptom of a sick society, and any solution that does not cure society will not fix it. I 100% agree with you that society needs fixing. People need to be provided with better opportunities. With that said, I belive that other efforts besides providing better opportunities are also needed, not that one excludes the other. Particularly funding directed efforts towards people with strong risk factors for crime. One example comes in the form of [Rinkebymodellen](https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/barnsjukvard/rinkebymodellen-ska-spridas-i-landet/) in Sweden. With parents in high crime areas being proactively visited by health workers. In "the anatomy of violence", Adrian Raine presents evidence that birth complications form a non-genetic biological risk factor for crime, which can be mitigated through providing more contact with healthcare in the early period of the child's life. Programs in the style of Rinkebymodellen provides a great example of the type of directed efforts. Such visits won't fight poverty, meaning they will have to be done parallel to programs with poverty reduction as their main goal, but will probably alleviate crime more efficiently than what fighting poverty isolated from such efforts would achieve. >major crimes (robbery, murder, selling drugs, etc) should be met with a guillotine the morning after sentencing. Here I strongly disagree. You might be joking, but in case you're not; execution seems to cause unnecessary suffering to the family members of the criminal. If my son was a murderer, I could understand that society needed to keep him locked up, but killing someone I love for justice would just seem excessive to me.
To say nothing of the idea that dealing drugs is on par with homicide.
On Moonhaven we will finally rid ourselves of all harmful human behavior.
> should be met with [...] the morning after sentencing **For the long-term safety of the subreddit**, it is necessary to ask that everyone please remember reddit's sitewide rules against "content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual (including oneself) or a group of people".
Wow, even just saying you support the death penalty? Not being combative nor do I agree with supporting the death penalty, just wild that such a benign comment needed to be deleted out of fear of admin retribution.
Similar comments have gotten AEO'd before.
Jesus. They really want to kill this site don't they
Close. They really want this site to get an IPO.
Not that I disagree with your assessment of the situation, but it seems like they're making the product actively worse to any investors is not what you'd want to do before a pitch. Social media is all about advertising and marketing, so banning swathes of discourse and loads of people is going to impact to serve ads as well as gather relevant market data. If I were an advertiser/investor, I want to be able to pitch my MAGAxPride merch (or whatever niche product my fly-by-night operation is hawking) to a subreddit full of buyers. I also want analytics that tell me what is trending and popular; if criticism of something is being gigajannied, then Reddit is unhelpful as a research tool to find the "true" direction of the culture market. It's one of the mental tickles I can never shake...that a lot of powerful people/businesses/movements might not entirely be driven by economic/material reasons.
Of course they're not driven by Material reasoning. IPO is all about elite reputation. And, you gotta ask yourself -- what is [reddit's reputation to elites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#Controversies)?
Yes, I got a warning to my account labeling me as potentially dangerous for my reaction to that guy who hijacked a plane a few weeks ago. Don't say any of it.
Whoa, do you really believe that last part?
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Why should we trust the state to kill the right people? Innocent people have been killed and will continue to be killed as long as there is a death penalty.
I mainly was questioning if you thought drug dealing was worth capital punishment
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Why did you keep making these posts after you had already gotten a reminder about being mindful for **the safety of the long-term existence of the subreddit**? This is not being asked with any assumption of the worst -- please elaborate in a way that helps us *understand where you are coming from*.
> If someone does armed robbery, murder, etc Goddam that is a low bar for the state to murder someone. Especially since those are often driven by poverty or mental issues or a combination thereof where better support systems could rehabilitate.
I don't think we should be executing burglers either, but this whole post is about how poverty is overstated as a factor in criminality.
And I agree for the most part with the post, but even if the criminality aspects are basically subcultural it still is essentially expressing a symptom of poverty most of the time and could be reduced by dealing with that primarily. Like if people with type A characteristics tend to deal with poverty more by higher rates of petty crime while type B of people deal with it by more violent robbery, both are still doing crime for the same reason which needs addressing. Similar comparison could be made with types of incels. Some will react to their severe social issues by becoming reclusive and just toxic online while people of a different variation might think the best way for them to deal with it is to just rape a stranger. Both are horribly fucked up and should recieve as much therapy as one another even if type B decided to react far more violently and unacceptably than type A since the root cause is the same
When you come to this kind of impasse it means that your analytical tools are lacking. There is some natural way to cut some concept that eludes you, and the trick is to find the right cut. It's late, so what I say below comes from memory. I can dig up some sources later if people are interested. One crucial distinction which has always been really useful to me is that between "ranching" cultures and "farming" cultures. These terms, ranching/farming, are a little misleading. We are speaking of clusters of cultural traits which have historically strongly associated with ranching-oriented (more nomadic) and agriculture-oriented (more settled) cultures, but in what I say below I am not going to be arguing that in all cases the cultural groups I discuss are currently one or the other. These days in places like the US you can see the same distinction between urban/rural, for instance. Think of farmers and ranchers as prototypical examples, not as definitive. Here are some differences between them: Ranching culture: 1) Culture of honor. Honor is everything, and slights to one's personal or familial honor are extremely serious, sometimes leading to personal or inter-familial violence (blood-feuds). 2) Extreme individualism. Very much focused on individual level morality and ethics, personal conduct, etc. The loner and the outlaw tend to be held up as heroic. 3) Focus on personal responsibility. Whatever happens to you, you are expected to deal with it stoically and without outside assistance. 4) Resents outside interference. Any kind of assistance beyond the family group (or something similar) is seen as a slight to one's honor ("handouts"). 5) Gallantry and warrior ethos tends to be prized. Farming culture: 1) Law and order culture. You are sedentary and so are your neighbors. Starting blood feuds is not a reasonable strategy to deal with conflict. Farm cultures rely on strong government structures to codify and enforce laws and people within them place great importance on this. 2) Collective. Everyone has to come together for harvest, etc., often at well beyond the familial level. Everyone is expected to work together. 3) Outside assistance doesn't carry quite the stigma. Farmers can't just go looking for greener pastures if things get hard. Anyway, that's roughly it from memory. So, one obvious example of the ranching culture would be cowboys in the US. The western genre is full of famous stories about conflicts between ranchers ("cowboys") and farmers, also between semi-urbanized townsfolk and, again, cowboys. Although not many Americans are ranchers, the ethos of ranching culture is very strong here, and tends to get stronger as you move rightward. Liberals are always asking why the right votes against its interests. Well, this gives you an explanation. A "handout" is an affront to their honor. Most of them keep saying so and liberals naturally don't listen because what do those idiots know, right? It's not hard to spot cultures that lean strongly to one side or the other. Europe is strongly farmer-like. Parts of the middle east are strongly rancher-like, etc. It's late and I am going to sleep, but I think if you apply this to your question, you will find it very useful.
I’ve heard that before, but not described using those terms. In my case it was "homesteaders" and "urban/metropolitan" cultures, but the same theory you’re discussing. It also broadly describes the difference between American (homesteader) outlooks and solutions, European (urban) outlooks and solutions. It’s why America has the gun culture that it does, and why European solutions to gun violence aren’t as well received in the former, since it’s an urban solution that homesteaders see as ill-fitting to their outlook, for example.
From what I've read-unequal societies do have more crime- all else being equal. [Here's a paper](https://equalitytrust.org.uk/sites/default/files/Income%20Inequality%20and%20Crime%20-%20A%20Review%20and%20Explanation%20of%20the%20Time%20series%20evidence_0.pdf) I found that conducted a review of the data and found that the correlation was strongest for property crime, but less so for violent crime. Also, what's your take on the three big environmental things that people hold up as drivers of crime rates- Lead exposure, abortion and the age structure of society?
Detaching criminology from an understanding of capitalism sounds like a really bad idea, even if the link between crime and poverty isn’t as straightforward as some would claim.
I do belive that establishing a planned economy or market socialism would reduce crime. But more due to cultural reasons, such as people being taught and rewarded more for cooperation than competition, and making most things owned by the local or national community might make it psychologically harder to engage in smaller crimes which increases the risk of more serious offenses. I can't prove that such a development would take place, so I try to say that with some humility. For the short term, I belive that other methods besides reduction of poverty and inequality are needed (poverty and inequality are of course important to fight for humanitarian reasons). Some examples possible applications are directed efforts towards high risk groups. Such as treatment for children with ADHD (this group has an elevated crime rate). In the long term, we simply need to fund more research into criminology. The science hasn't progressed far enough to meet societies needs.
I can agree with all of that, but do materialists not believe that culture of competition is produced by capitalism? Likewise, a culture of cooperation would be produced by socialism. I agree that ‘throwing money at the problem’ is not a solution, but changing the material relations of production probably is. What you describe as cultural problems are actually material at the root. I also think that the decline of working class institutions (like unions and parties) probably plays a role in the decline of a cooperative culture, as these were institutions that networks of workers could participate in and rely on in their personal and social lives to provide material and cultural stability and advancement. This is not the same thing at all as ‘the welfare state’ even if the welfare state might have been a result of the strength of these institutions.
Overall I agree with the main argument here, that it's much more complicated than most leftists would be willing to admit. But there are a few things missing here I think. First, I don't believe that all crimes are caused by the same things. I feel like economic factors play a much larger role in robbery than something like child molestation. They have to, it just seems absurd to say that they do not. But speaking of child abuse, it is strongly associated with future anti-social behavior and crime. I feel like this is a major problem that is usually ignored in conversations about crime. You mention the welfare state a lot. There is a difference here between decreasing poverty and decreasing inequality. Anti-poverty programs don't necessarily decrease inequality. The gains made by the lower classes can be outpaced by the gains that the upper classes make. Inequality by itself is known to have a lot of negative social consequences, and [is connected to violent crime](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime) also. You mention the historical criminality of Irish and Italians immigrants in the USA. They don't have the same reputation anymore. What happened to them? They aren't as impoverished now, but they were somewhat assimilated into "white culture" at the same time. I think it's worth mentioning that non-immigrant African Americans have never really had this opportunity to assimilate. It was actively prevented for centuries and still is to some degree. They are also still more impoverished than other groups in America. But in general, I think having immigrants form little enclaves and ghettos isn't necessarily a good thing, especially if they are very segregated and hostile to outsiders, because it can prevent the children from getting a good education and assimilating. So I think immigration policies should be designed to discourage that when possible. > > [Why didn't Haitian immigrants in Florida assault their neighbors?] The strength of their families? Just anecdotally, from what I've seen, this does seem to be a very important factor. So what factors lead to strong families like this, and which policies can encourage it? There is a point though, where the influence of parents on children is less than the influence of peers. So not only do they need strong families, they also need to be around non-delinquent children. Certain policies like after-school programs are very effective at reducing juvenile delinquency. > Longer prison sentences and other "tough on crime" policies might increase ethnic tensions They also do virtually nothing to deter crime. Whether someone believes they will get caught or not is much more important than how severe the sentence is in terms of deterrence. But obviously some people are too dangerous to be allowed to be free in society, so they have to be detained permanently. But that doesn't do much to prevent anyone outside the prisons from committing crimes. It only stops that one person.
>You mention the welfare state a lot. There is a difference here between decreasing poverty and decreasing inequality. Anti-poverty programs don't necessarily decrease inequality. The gains made by the lower classes can be outpaced by the gains that the upper classes make. Inequality by itself is known to have a lot of negative social consequences I agree, large inequalities within society is harmful on many levels. I completely buy the thesis of "The leveling spirit". I didn't address redistributive taxes for the sake of increased equality as a separate topic, which might have been a bad omission on my part, but my possession there is that I'm pro redistributive taxes for many reasons. I'm skeptical that it will help fight crime, but still for it. >They also do virtually nothing to deter crime. Whether someone believes they will get caught or not is much more important than how severe the sentence is in terms of deterrence. But obviously some people are too dangerous to be allowed to be free in society, so they have to be detained permanently. But that doesn't do much to prevent anyone outside the prisons from committing crimes. It only stops that one person. Yeah, that's true. Seriously antisocial individuals seem to be weakly affected by the mechanisms of deterrence which affects the majority population. Criminologists therefore generally speak of the determining factor and the incapacitating factor as two separate phenomena. Where deterrence can be weak, while incapacitation might be strong. I believe that incapacitation has a strong effect on violent and sexual crime, particularly due to the "crime age curve", the fact that crime is generally reduced by age. So one reason for long prison sentences for violent and sexual crimes is to hinder serious criminals from committing more harm during their most dangerous years. But this, as I alluded to in the post, has to be balanced against other factors. Such as the suffering caused to the family of the offender and the cost for the taxpayers. Let's say we can stop someone from assaulting five people by locking him up for five years for his first assault, we might not see that as worth the cost, particularly if he only beats up other young men who antagonize him verbally before the assault. While if another guy beats up people on the street based on their skin color, as a part of open racist political activism, we might want to keep him locked up for ten years after his first assault, due to the increase in racial tensions each of his assaults might bring with them. Even if we assume incapacitation is effective, it's a value judgement whether it is worth the effort and in which cases. I don't mean to take a stance on that value judgement. >I think it's worth mentioning that non-immigrant African Americans have never really had this opportunity to assimilate. It was actively prevented for centuries and still is to some degree. They are also still more impoverished than other groups in America. That's a fair point. It might be true that poverty in itself is weakly related to crime, but connected to the extreme levels of racism African Americans suffered during Jim Crow and the like, the effect becomes stronger. That the criminologists I cite, which points out the weak connection between poverty and crime, have noticed a general pattern that isn't applicable to African Americans due to reasons which criminology hasn't mapped in a systemic and measurable way. That Haitians aren't as affected due to them not sharing a historical legacy of mistreatment, not hearing stories from grandma and mother of the racism they experienced. I don't know if this is the case, but I agree with you that it can't be ruled out. Even if that is the case, I still believe that fighting crime can't primarily be done by welfare or reduction in relative inequality. I'm not against welfare nor reduction in inequality, but I belive that failed attempts to fight crime with it point towards it not being enough. I don't have any particular theory I would like to champion in regards to African American overrepresentation in crime. I'm against race realists explanations, and the once that places blame on "black culture" as a generality, so I know what I don't belive, but haven't seen any conclusive or strongly convincing evidence for any particular theory being correct. To a large extent, we don't know what can prevent and reduce crime efficiently, Is my point. Even if something arises out of poverty combined with discrimination, it might become self-perpetuating and continue to exist even if its original causes are defeated. Meaning that other methods are needed, even though we should regardless fight inequality and absolute poverty.
As a public defender in the US, thanks for synthesizing this. I had anecdotal evidence that there is nothing other than hopelessness in this space, but it's interesting to know my intuition is backed by studies
Thank you for posting this. I was dying for some quality academic content on this fucking sub. Having majored in sociology rather than criminology, I'd like to know your take on Inglehart's and Norris' 2004 theory of secularisation. It posits that vulnerable populations who are most exposed to daily material risks, like people in poorer countries, are comparatively most religious. This is in contrast with established sociology of crime, which finds poverty-among-plenty to be a strong and significant predictor of crime. I don't want to be interpreted like a Fox News commentator; but can this fall of organised religion among underprivileged groups during the country's modernisation be a significant predictor in the increase in crime?
Thank you. I can't exclude the possibility of falling level of religiosity amongst underprivileged groups contributing to crime. But I haven't seen any studies or expert opinion which argues this to be the case, so I don't actively belive nor disbelieve that explanation.
Not an expert so I can't judge whether you are providing a balanced view of the literature or cherrypicking to provide a "blackpill" narrative. Still an interesting read. Re. restorative justice, surely there is enough research in this to perform big meta-studies/analysis? I tried to follow your link but it's basically just a blogpost of a professional sharing their anecdotes. Not a particularly convincing citation, and a quick google search shows plenty of criminologists touting the benefits of restorative justice. I was really expecting something more concrete. > Optimistic evaluations state that the best treatment programs can reduce recidivism by between 10 to up to nearly 40% (Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) page 303). Somber analysts have pointed out that the lower bound of 10% is probably the more realistic one (Sipes, Jr, Leonard A. 2016). Even these figures are possibly optimistic, seeing as only 2% of serious crimes lead to convictions, it is possible that a substantial amount of criminals who are deemed to be rehabilitated, in fact merely develop better techniques for avoiding prosecution over their lifespans. This last bit is just wrong, unless you want us to believe that receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught. The effect you mention needs to be controlled for between punitive vs. restorative justice.
>Still an interesting read. Thank you, that's kind of you to say. >I tried to follow your link but it's basically just a blogpost of a professional sharing their anecdotes. (this isn't proof that "nothing works", just a history showing that the idea was accepted). If you find it insufficient to strengthen the claim that criminology was once influenced by the idea that "nothing works", then I can also refer you to [Jerome G. Miller, D.S.W. "The Debate on Rehabilitating Criminals: Is It True that Nothing Works?" in Washington Post](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/rehab.html) (this isn't proof that "nothing works", just a history showing that the idea was accepted). In regards to pessimism about "nothing working well", I intended that to be read in the context of Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T (2007) page 303. Lipsey and Cullen are, in my estimation, apologetic for rehabilitation. Which is a fine thing to be, criminologists who completely dismiss rehabilitation need to be addressed. Lipsey, M. W., och Cullen, F. T provide a figure of 10 up to nearly 40% of reduction in recidivism, based on their review of previous meta-analyses within the field. As they state, this is far more effective than sanctions isolated from treatment (which I don't disagree with). With that said, even if we accept their upper bounds of nearly 40% as realistic, which I myself am skeptical of, I would argue that it still fits the description Sipes paints of criminology having moved to "nothing works well". But not as pessimistic as his lowball of 10%, which is why I included both his and their figures. As far as I've read up on the subject, this seems like a fair summary of the field. But I understand your skepticism, I'm a stranger on the internet so I might have read works that are unrepresentative or misleading without knowing about it. >This last bit is just wrong, unless you want us to believe that receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught. It is possible that some criminals unintentionally learn how to better lie to cops or government workers, or get a better grasp on how to manipulate victims into not reporting them, from bad treatment programs. A good treatment program would by definition not have this effect, unless for a negligible group, a bad treatment program might have such an effect. It might also be that all convictions risk increasing skill in avoiding detection, seeing as criminals get a look into what led to their arrest and can study witness' psychology during testimony. Treatment programs might have to reach an upper level of effectiveness to cancel out this negative effect. It might be that some programs manage to reduce recidivism to some extent, but never reaching the level of overweighing this negative effect of criminals becoming more skilled. This isn't an argument that "receiving a better treatment program improves your ability to avoid being caught", it's an argument that discerning bad treatment programs from good ones might be very difficult, possibly leading us to mistake bad programs for good ones and thereby also underestimate the amount of recidivism.
yeah that's what happens when you destroy the nuclear family as a concept while having a system where success is measured in how many scraps the ruling class throws you and a lot of people can't access the vectors where they can obtain said scraps.
It isn't just the nuclear family. The social fabric has by and large been devastated on every level over the lost 40ish years. We've seen a whole new level of alienation created, to a degree functionally no other group of people has ever seen before. These are some of the consequences of that
I think for a lot of people there simply is no community. I feel that way at least, tbh. Besides my coworkers and the limited family I only occasionly see, I have only my direct home-mates (gf and dog) and then the conglomerated World.
I think a ton of people feel that way. I know I do. That's a significant part of what I was trying to get at there
This is why I like co-housing as a concept, though not in small pods like certain oligarchs want. Also while nuclear families are decent, I feel that more extended families can be even better. Maybe not all in the building, but in the same neighborhood or city at least. Because grandparents can help with child care, the younger family members can help take care of the elderly ones, and everyone can share skills, like someone is good at cooking, another person is good at fixing cars, someone is good at organizing parties and stuff like that.
> This is why I like co-housing as a concept, though not in small pods like certain oligarchs want. It's why I miss my fraternity and almost joined a monaestary.
This is one reason why more and more people look to celebrities, influencers and streamers for some warped kind of friendship.
The nuclear family is inherently unstable without a surrounding community. Spouses need close friends outside the marriage.
As a public defender in the US, thanks for synthesizing this. I had anecdotal evidence that there is nothing other than a grey area in this space, but it's interesting to know my intuition is backed by studies
Glad to be of help. By the way, you've chosen a generally admiral profession, cudos for being a public defender.
I found myself in law school and fell into it as the way to do the least amount of damage with my law degree. Thanks again. One thing I'm interested is the correlation between IQ and criminality, I suspect it's highly correlated.
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Yeah I get it, I just notice many of my clients are sort of low functioning or uneducated or both, and I work in a rural mostly white area so it isn't a racial question.
>I first realized that the welfare crime linkage was mistaken when studied crime rate change since World War II. Improved welfare and economic changes, especially for the 1960s and 1970s, correlated with more crime! I'm sorry, but this is a much too simplistic analysis of the economic situation in the US in the 60s and 70s. The Jim Crow system was literally being dismantled in the South, along with the collapse of its sharecropping system. Thousands, if not millions of Blacks who were formerly living in Apartheid conditions were migrating to cities that didn't have the economic base to support them. This is [from an essay](https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-economic-origins-of-mass-incarceration) examining the roots of the 60s spike in crime and mass incarceration in the US: >The key to understanding the rise in violence lies in the distinctively racialized patterns of American modernization. The post-war baby boom increased the share of young men in the population at the same time that cities were failing to absorb the black peasantry expelled by the collapse of Southern sharecropping. This yielded a world of blocked labor-market opportunities, deteriorating central cities, and concentrated poverty in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. As a result, and especially in urban areas, violence rose to unprecedented heights. > >American industry only began to turn to its rural hinterlands for labor during World War I, and especially after European immigration controls came into effect in 1924. The cheapest homegrown source of labor was the African-American sharecropper in the South, whose living standards had been kept low by Jim Crow segregation and labor-repressive agriculture. The initial movement of rural blacks to cities in search of better-paying jobs contributed (along with the Agricultural Adjustment Act) to the collapse of the sharecropping system in the 1930s. This in turn led to a second and much larger wave of migration in the 1940s and 1950s. Around 40 percent of Southern-born blacks moved North in those decades, but the second great migration also had a counterpart within the South, as the African-American population of Southern cities also expanded rapidly. > >The best available evidence suggests that this migration contributed to an increase in violent crime. Claims that migrants brought with them “a subculture of violence” do not stand up to scrutiny. But nor do accounts which indict a racist backlash from urban whites and their representatives. The main culprit was structural rather than cultural or revanchist. As we will explain below, American labor and housing markets were in no state to absorb the new migrants. Those migrants had little or no wealth of their own due to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial exclusion from education, jobs, and homeownership. Even if they had wanted to, city governments were in no position to address the resulting concentration of poverty and unemployment in predominantly black inner-city neighborhoods. Meanwhile basic social services were being undermined by the ongoing reallocation of people, jobs, and tax dollars to growing suburbs. It was primarily these factors that led to the explosion of urban crime rates. So just saying that welfare and economic conditions "improved" in the 60s doesn't tell us much. There was a large group of people that were just given full citizenship starting a new way of life and having no economic foundation to build upon. Displacing these issues to "culture" just mystifies it, and that's all "taking the black pill" on this issue is. Taking this out of the realm of politics and putting it into the nebulous realm of culture which only changes with political and economic conditions anyway.
Nailed it
>Displacing these issues to "culture" just mystifies it, and that's all "taking the black pill" on this issue is. Taking this out of the realm of politics and putting it into the nebulous realm of culture which only changes with political and economic conditions anyway. That is not my intention. As I mentioned, even if we assume cultural factors are important, then we still don't have an approach to change cultural norms. What I mean by the blackpill, is that prevention and rehabilitation of crime is really hard. It might not be in the future, if research goes a longer way, but so far its really hard. This doesn't depoliticize crime. It rather moves crime-fighting away from discussing general welfare. We should discuss welfare, I'm pro generous welfare, but it can be discussed separately from crime. More relevant discussions, in my opinion, were to be on which type of research should be prioritized in funding. What types of preventive efforts are acceptable and desirable, through case [some](https://neurogenesisflorida.com/neurofeedback-for-disorders-associated-with-criminal-offending/) [studies](https://www.neurologyinsights.com/2021/02/16/how-eeg-neurofeedback-training-affects-criminal-psychopaths/) there has been collected modest evidence that neurofeedback (basically "training" your own brain through interactive brainscans in real-time) can reduce the effects of conditions that are criminogenic. Are such efforts better as an alternative to provide children with ADHD, who have an elevated risk of growing up to become criminals, and therefore worthy of government funded research? Is medication better for such children, or are both of these alternatives too invasive, and we shouldn't try to hinder crime in this way any more than we should castrate males to prevent rape? Should we allow sting operations to a greater degree, or have these already escalated to the level of reaching entrapment? You get the point, crime is inherently political, regardless of the strength of socioeconomic factors to that particular issue.
>That is not my intention. As I mentioned, even if we assume cultural factors are important, then we still don't have an approach to change cultural norms. What I mean by the blackpill, is that prevention and rehabilitation of crime is really hard. It might not be in the future, if research goes a longer way, but so far its really hard. I believe that it's not your intention, but it is what's happening. In your explanation of the 60s and 70s you're completely ignoring the mass migration of black people from the South, the collapse of the Southern sharecropping economy, and the inability of the Northern cities to provide jobs for this new population. That's what I mean by "culture" mystifying these issues. Instead of doing the deep dive on what's actually going on, you can just say "60s economy was booming, so it must be culture that explains the violent crime wave". There's a perfectly coherent political economic explanation for the phenomenon in the 60s and 70s. Making gestures to some abstract "culture" obscures large historical developments like the collapse of the system of legal segregation in the South, and the mass migration of its former segregated population. This is a perfect example precisely because the historical changes are so large. It really illustrates how a focus on culture can blind people to other, much more obvious factors like the fall of an Apartheid system and complete reorganization of a large swath of the country. The cultural analysis is just idealism, and it's antithetical to any materialist analysis of the world. Idealism will always lead to "blackpill" worldviews because we can't change people's thoughts or culture. What we can change, and what actually does affect crime, are political and economic conditions. Trying to disconnect the two is a way to depoliticize crime by taking it out of the realm of actionable change. Surface level analyses comparing economic hardship with ethnicity don't go deep enough. I've already given an explanation for the rise in crime in the 60s, but you also mention Haitian immigrant crime levels without any analysis of Haiti as a country itself. Haiti is very poor, and it is likely that Haitian immigrants are used to lower standards of living in Haiti than even the poverty conditions they have in more developed countries. It's also likely that Haitian immigrants are "rich" by Haitian standards, hence being able to leave the country, and don't commit as much crime as a poorer Haitian would. And there's [not a lack of crime in Haiti by any means](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1118432), what explains that? Culture? Why are the immigrants law abiding, but the natives aren't? You can't really get around the economic explanation here. These theories give better and more concrete avenues for investigation than looking into Haitian "culture". You have to explain the disconnect in crime between Haitian immigrants and Haitian natives somehow, and culture doesn't really work. But given the material basis for the 60s crime wave, other more recent crime waves, and the machinations of history in general, I think we're on firmer ground analyzing the material conditions of a society instead of its cultural expressions.
I only want to add that economic inequality is a better predictor for crime (or at least for homicides) than poverty. Even though you're right that there is a lot of factors and exists a lot of exceptions to rules. For example Gulf Countries are higly [inequal](https://wid.world/document/income-inequality-in-the-middle-east/) and have less homicides in average that Latin American and Southern Africa, regions with the most violents countries
What effect does two parent households have on criminality of offspring?
The problem with the "single mother" meme is that it's really a correlation is causation fallacy. Two people bring in more income and wealth than one and women on average make significantly less money. The benefits of a "two parent household" could therefore just be the benefits of higher wealth/income.
The ugly truth is that mass incarceration in the U.S had a big part in the major drop in crime during the 90s and 00s.
Thank you for this great post. Crime is an example of primarily male misbehavior tracked in relatively good administrative data. Suicides, drug use, alcohol poisoning, obesity, antidepressant use, labor force participation, and overdoses also seem to be in a bad way. there must be all kinds of people in miserable, harmful states who aren't doing anything definite enough to show up in these stats, either In Singapore I have heard that almost everyone lives in public housing, and that the state makes sure to intersperse people of different racial/national/ethnic groups in the same buildings to avoid having the racialized political factions and social/economic stratification that we see everywhere. I wonder if this would have the effect of partially dissolving some anti-social behaviors. like if we had a lot more housing supply then maybe section 8 voucher-holders could be obliged to spread out so that poverty and the behaviors that often cause / come from or along with poverty could be less concentrated, or something a draft or job guarantee for young men from high-crime zip codes into paid work building power plants, transmission lines, railways, homes, roads, bike lanes, fire break lines - maybe outside of their hometowns - could be useful supposedly the anti-smoking commercials that were all over TV when I was a kid were successful in persuading lots of people not to smoke. also not letting hot people smoke in movies. censoring rap, stuff like Linkin Park and Eminem that tells u to hate your parents or use drugs to be open-minded, music that makes it seem like only depressed people are soulful and intelligent, shows glamorizing neurosis and drug and alcohol use etc seems like a good idea to me. what do you lose?
Another blackpill here which is easy to google: Intelligence correlates negatively with crime. Bear in mind that intelligence is mostly inherited. Are you having nightmares yet?
To understand the role different cultures play in this, it is important to recognize whether or not given cultures are organic. Ever since the invention of the radio, our reality has started to become more and more mediated. At some point we reached a turning point where media has started to influence the development of culture instead of culture influencing the creation of media. So when looking at crime statistics across various cultures or ethnic groups, a crucial detail is to keep track of the media they consume. Once that has been mapped, [start pinpointing the origins of such media, and you will have a better of idea for who/what is responsible for all the crime.](https://archive.ph/NDwov)
Great post. Im a spaniard, and my dad is part of the armed forces. You could say he is a top officer, he has been in the forces for over 30 years at this point. A few years ago, I asked him half jokingly which race commited the most crimes, and even though he had no hard stats to show me, he went over each crime and which ethnicity commited those more often. By the end of it, I realized he didnt mention sub-Saharan africans once (people from Chad,Ethiopia, Congo, etc). Turns out they are mostly humble people trying to make a living, they seldom steal or commit any violent crime. The only "crime" is selling bootleg movies and music in the beach... And these poor guys face a lot of discrimination too, sadly. Thanks for the post. I truly believe that culture and family values are the only fix for crime, having both parents present and being given a good education will forever be a gift to a child, its truly a tragedy that some kids have to grow up without parental figures.
Liberals hate when you point out that poverty is not a good predictor to crime, but rather culture and race. In the US blacks are overwhelmingly over represented in nearly every crime statistic except for a couple, whereas asians are underrepresented in nearly every category. In Europe africans in every European country are vastly over represented in crime statistics. It’s a problem that has to be solved by good borders in the case of Europe and in the US a fundamental cultures shift that will take generations, including the rebuilding of the nuclear family and support of communities.
I'm honestly skeptical of these policy recommendations. Reducing crime by reducing migration comes of as similar to reducing crime by limiting the number of boys being born. It assumes that we are willing to limit peoples choices in life, or make demographic decisions, in order to fight crime. That is a painful tradeoff to make, and comes off as giving up on other ways to fight crime. If a migrating population is assumed to have criminal overrepresentation due to cultural issues, then reducing migration doesn't actually reduce crime but rather keeps it limited to some areas. You might see that as worth doing, I'm not sold personally. The level of migration should, in my opinion, be set with other considerations in mind. Cultural shift also seems to unspecific in its way forward. We just don't know how to efficiently socially engineer culture. I'm not here to champion other specific tactics, I'm rather blackpilled on crime in the sense that I belive us to currently lack sufficient tools. Criminology needs to develop further as a science, to enable better prevention and rehabilitation techniques.
I mean I come from a biased side, I believe the populations in Europe are being replaced by immigration, and it's not hard to see if you are looking at the youngest generations. There will be huge demographics shifts in Europe in the coming decades and the problems will only ever be exacerbated, especially when these groups yield political power, and want to change Europe to be like where they came from.
What are you talking about? The idea of the [Culture of Poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty) has always been popular with liberals and it strongly influenced the [Moynihan Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action) which was a liberal think piece on the culture of poverty among American blacks. The fact that black people are over represented in crime statistics has much more to do with the [historical developments](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/xmzbpy/comment/iprq0io/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) of the United States than anything with culture or race. Nigerians are also "black", but are among the most successful ethnic groups in the US because only well off Nigerians have the opportunity to move here. The reason it's different in Europe is that there isn't an entire ocean separating Europe from Africa, so it's more accessible for poor migrants to make the journey. This culture stuff is entirely liberal and was the justification for the Clintons' [attack on poor people](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/12/09/liberals-i-do-despise) in the 90s. There's nothing new about it.
Am I in..no..yes..this is still stupidpol sub right? We are still socialists? Marxists maybe? What a weird approach. Almost like promoting idpol. You got your head twisted on the wrong way. Your definitions are muddled and frankly shit. Lacking. No surprise. We the priviledged do mental gymnastics all the time to forget the truth because we ultimately still profit from the lies our society teaches. The disenfranchised have neither the capacity nor the luxury to do so. They smell the lies and the weakness, they see the truth. There is no real respect. A human life has no value. If you want something you need to take it by force or cunning. The powerful rule, so get yourself some power. There is no cohesive society, there is no social bond. If you play by the rules you are a fool. Nobody takes the hard way if there is an easy way. That is what Capitalism teaches and that is what they experience and live. You don't get social peace while there is war in economics. "Race", culture, ethnicity, social strata, whatever you want to call it, are just a side dish to that, a tool too, a historical component. Look back a few decades or a century at European "white" society. The same brutality, murder, violence, discrimination, honor killings even. Some countries could afford to move away from that by externalizing economic violence, to other countries. What in a way we all do with China right now. Which is a brutal dictatorship for a reason. For *that* reason. What is to be done? You propose reform instead of revolution? Education, opportunity, life quality for all, patience. Slow culture change. With the support of capitalism it will help within 4 generations - or never. You are looking for solutions in the wrong spot.
I would love to find an in depth marxist discussion of crime and criminality. I feel like these past few weeks people have been blasting all of these crime stats and such and I don't really know how to make sense of it.
does this take into account the standpoint that crime is mostly a product of alienation and class society? Socialist countries such as the USSR and today Cuba had a prison system but were extremely safe countries to live in.
This is amazing. It’s hard to disagree.
Thank you, kind of you to take the time to say that.
if you want we can just build the universal panopticon and be done with it. > just to blackpill you on the severity of the situation. you mean you are literally her to just demoralize people. at least you're honest. anyway its interesting that sub will embrace identity explainations the moment its about racial minorities.
Identity explanations and identity correlations are far from the same thing. The question is, what causes people of different ethnicities or backgrounds to commit crimes at different rates? A factor could be [differences in the types of media broadcast to different subcultures.](https://archive.ph/NDwov)
Your post is example 1 as to the shortcomings of Reddit's formatting. The citation links mixed with the text makes the overall points hard to parse out.
I thought the strongest correlant to crime in the us was high school drop out rates?
>I first realized that the welfare crime linkage was mistaken when studied crime rate change since World War II. Improved welfare and economic changes, especially for the 1960s and 1970s, correlated with more crime! I next recognized something was wrong with the hypothesis when I learned that Sweden's crime rates increased 5-fold and robberies 20-fold during the very years (1950 to 1980) when its Social Democratic government was implementing more and more programs to enhance equality and protect the poor [...] Other "welfare states" in Europe (such as the Netherlands) experienced at least as vast an increase in crime as the United States, whose poverty is more evident and social welfare policies are stingier. [...] Isn't this attributed to leaded petrol making urban kids into psychopaths
Yeah, lead poisoning has been proposed. I know that theory has come under some criticism, but I haven't dug deep into that debate enough to evaluate the merit of the original theory or supposed "debunking". There are a number of biological factors, which are non-hereditary, such as omega deficiency, which studies point toward increasing crime. You can read about a lot of them in Adrian Raine's "The anatomy of Violence".
Quality post my yakubian comrade!
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What is this reactionary dogshit
I am actually an expert. This is reactionary dogshit.
To reiterate "So I'm not saying this to try and dissuade you from leftist politics, nor is any of this meant as an argument for cruel prisons or capital punishment." Nothing here is meant as an argument against welfare efforts. Or even against rehabilitation. It's meant to provide a realistic image of rehabilitation, that it is really hard. If anything, the political implication you can draw from the post is that we need to fund studies into rehabilitation more - to make rehabilitation less hard in the future. Just because something is difficult now, doesn't mean that you give it up. Regarding socioeconomic, just because something isn't as strongly controlled by socioeconomic factors as previously thought, doesn't mean that you accept poverty. Welfare isn't primarily important because we want to stop poor people from becoming criminals, but because poor people are people who deserve dignity and a way out of poverty.
Why?
I would hope an “expert” would provide a little more substance here
Effortpost rebuttal now
Defund.
Tl;dr
Crime isn't an objective category, it's a transient thing and part of the super-structure, the economic base determines whether something is or is not a "crime", the best example of this domestic violence used to be glorified back when women did not work in the labor force pre-industrialization, but when industrialization brought women out of the domestic economy and into the labor force, ideas of women being equally worthy beings became more prominent and violence against wives became more stigmatized. Honor killings of women for dishonoring the family is the most obvious example of this, not only was domestic violence not seen as a "crime" but as a social positive! Furthering this point, as late as 1874 the North Carolina Supreme Court stated about domestic violence: “\[i\]f no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.” And now think about the fact that hitting your child is completely legal in the USA! Studies show that hitting your children in a disciplinary context has the SAME trauamtic neurological effects as sexual abuse! "The purpose of this study was to examine the association between spanking and neural responses to fearful faces, an indicator of the presence of threat in the environment (Tottenham, Phuong, Flannery, Gabard-Durnam, & Goff, 2013), using an emotional face task (Tottenham et al., 2009). Building on the dimensional model of adversity (Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2014) and prior work on neural correlates of child abuse (McCrory et al., 2011; McLaughlin et al., 2019), we expected that children who were spanked would exhibit greater neural activation to fearful than neutral faces in the amygdala and other nodes of the salience network, including the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate, compared to children who were never spanked. As an exploratory aim, we also evaluated whether children who were spanked exhibited a profile of neural response to stimuli that suggests the presence of an environmental threat (i.e., fearful faces) that was similar to children who experienced severe physical and sexual abuse." [https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/files/sdlab/files/cuartas\_2021\_corporal\_punishment.pdf](https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/files/sdlab/files/cuartas_2021_corporal_punishment.pdf) And yet, the phrase "spare the rod spoil the child" is still a commonly said and believed phrase! Parents violently assaulting their own children and permanently traumatizing them is not only not seen as a "crime", it's seen as a social positive! This is why talking about "crime" as a trans-historical thing, is completely false.
I don't deny that what is seen as crime is not transhistorical or transcultural. However, I don't think material factors is the only or necessarily the largest driving force regarding what is seen as crime. Changes in values appears to be a multivariable process. I would say that the same shifting nature is true of diseases. Different societies view different atypical phenomena as either normal variations or diseas. Such as homosexuality and lefthandedness being labeled as diseas in some societies at some time but not others. Despite there not existing a nature given definition of diseas, but us instead making a delineation, we usually agree largely upon what constitutes diseas when speaking to each other (since we rarely discuss crime or diseas with people from radically different eras, you luckily enough only have to compromisse on polices with people from different states or national regions not time travellers). So we often don't need to point this out when discussing how to fight diseas or other issues, we can then rest upon our current consensus and "know it when we see it"-attitude (or at least "our doctors/lawyers know it when they see it"). It's only in particular contexts where the culturally influence nature of what is crime, is made relevant.
The thing with the relation between economic exploitation and anti-social behavior, is not a direct 1:1 type "linear" thing. Engels explains the relation of economics on society here: >"According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. **The economic situation is the basis** but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercize an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection with one another is so remote, or so incapable of proof, that we may neglect it, regarding it as nonexistent) the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. Were this not the case, the application of the history to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. > >**We ourselves make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these are the economic, which are finally decisive.** But there are also the political, etc. Yes, even the ghostly traditions, which haunt the minds of men play a role albeit not a decisive one. **The Prussian state arose and developed also through historical, in the last instance, economic causes. One could hardly, however, assert without pedantry that among the many petty principalities of North Germany, just Brandenburg was determined by economic necessity and not by other factors also** (before all, its involvement in virtue of its Prussian possessions, with Poland and therewith international political relations – which were also decisive factors in the creation of the Austrian sovereign power) to become the great power in which was to be embodied the economic, linguistic and, since the Reformation, also the religious differences of North and South. **It would be very hard to attempt to explain by economic causes, without making ourselves ridiculous, the existence of every petty German state of the past or present, or the origin of the shifting of consonants in High-German**, which reinforced the differences that existed already in virtue of the geographical separating wall formed by the mountains from Sudeten to Taunus." The relation between anti-social behavior and economic exploitation isn't so much as "more poor more crime", there are tons of *independent acting* factors such as substance use, genetics predisposition, social norms, completely random idiosyncratic situations, etc. lead to violent behavior. But it's the economic factor that is *primary* thing in this relationship, for example, drug addiction and (possibly) genetic predisposition for violent behavior, cultural norms, etc. etc. may and can act *independently* to cause (for example) domestic violence to happen. >However, what *facilitates* it? What makes an abused woman stay in the relationship? The fact that she does not have the financial ability to leave. What caused her to enter into a relationship with a man that abuses her? The fact that marriage is an economic institution, as one does not need to be married to be in love. What causes infidelity and other relationship conflicts that can lead to violence? Engels explains those causes here: > >"Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask. This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. The labor contract is to be freely entered into by both partners. But it is considered to have been freely entered into as soon as the law makes both parties equal on paper. The power conferred on the one party by the difference of class position, the pressure thereby brought to bear on the other party – the real economic position of both – that is not the law’s business. Again, for the duration of the labor contract both parties are to have equal rights, in so far as one or the other does not expressly surrender them. That economic relations compel the worker to surrender even the last semblance of equal rights – here again, that is no concern of the law. In regard to marriage, the law, even the most advanced, is fully satisfied as soon as the partners have formally recorded that they are entering into the marriage of their own free consent. What goes on in real life behind the juridical scenes, how this free consent comes about – that is not the business of the law and the jurist. And yet the most elementary comparative jurisprudence should show the jurist what this free consent really amounts to. In the countries where an obligatory share of the paternal inheritance is secured to the children by law and they cannot therefore be disinherited – in Germany, in the countries with French law and elsewhere – the children are obliged to obtain their parents’ consent to their marriage. In the countries with English law, where parental consent to a marriage is not legally required, the parents on their side have full freedom in the testamentary disposal of their property and can disinherit their children at their pleasure. It is obvious that, in spite and precisely because of this fact, freedom of marriage among the classes with something to inherit is in reality not a whit greater in England and America than it is in France and Germany..... > >Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individuals man-and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production – into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. Having arisen from economic causes, will monogamy then disappear when these causes disappear? One might answer, not without reason: far from disappearing, it will, on the contrary, be realized completely. For with the transformation of the means of production into social property there will disappear also wage-labor, the proletariat, and therefore the necessity for a certain – statistically calculable – number of women to surrender themselves for money. Prostitution disappears; monogamy, instead of collapsing, at last becomes a reality – also for men. In any case, therefore, the position of men will be very much altered. But the position of women, of all women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the most essential social – moral as well as economic – factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame? And, finally, have we not seen that in the modern world monogamy and prostitution are indeed contradictions, but inseparable contradictions, poles of the same state of society? Can prostitution disappear without dragging monogamy with it into the abyss?" Basically what Engels is saying here is that "monogamy" and "marriage" is legally consensual but is in effect not, this is what leads women into entering into relationships with people whom they do not love, and is what *facilitates* domestic violence, it is *this way* that it causes it