this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Good luck Sweeden. Gang violence is really hard to solve, and the “tough-on-crime” politics is damaging. Here’s hoping you can thread that needle.
How is tough on crime damaging?
From my (cursory understanding) the "tough" portion only works if you're utterly draconian. E.g. if you want to stop jaywalking and put a minimum of two to five years in prison on it, you probably will cut jaywalking by more than 99%.
The level of human rights abuses you'd need to get rid of gangs by merely being draconian would simply not be reconcilable with European laws. For reference: They summary executed/murdered thousands in the Philippines and it didn't work..
If you're classically tough, you have all the side-effects of prison. Prison essentially teaches people to become criminals. After all they get to network with other criminals and also they get traumatized (yes, Swedes prisons are more humane than others, but a cage is a cage).
Basically, what you want it is to make crime an irrational decision but making sure that it doesn't pay of. By that you get all rational people. Against the rest deterrence doesn't work anyway. And in that context it's more important to make sure no one gets to keep any drug money than to jail people.
El Salvador shows how it can work, of course what went down there also wouldn't fly in Europe but crucially they didn't actually go around and murdered people en masse -- they rather humiliated them and dished out long prison sentences left and right not particularly caring whether they put away innocent people.
The primary goal was to make sure that the country isn't a constant war-zone any more, to get the violence off the streets, and in that the policy succeeded. It was harsh, but not heartless -- all those humiliated and locked-up people do still have chances in life, at least in principle. Parents can hope for their kids instead of mourn them. In other areas Bukele is just as much of an idiot as other techbros. But as far as dictators go he's one of the good ones, so far, whether his long-term legacy will be "tough man who did what he had to do to save the country" or "tough man who tried to save the country and made everything even worse by getting rid of the rule of law" is up in the air. El Salvador might turn into Haiti, into Uruguay, or Singapore. Who knows.
That alone isn't enough, you also need to provide alternatives or people are going to take their chance. In El Salvador the situation was so bad that the government didn't really have to do anything in that regard -- once the daily shootouts on the streets are gone people have the opportunity to sell fast food on the street, again, generally do business. But in a European setting mere cracking down won't be enough. Or, in other words: Things aren't nearly bad enough in Sweden to even begin to justify even entertaining the El Salvador solution.
The best criminal policy is social policy.
Well, in El Salvador it currently looks like it's working. But, as you said, we haven't really seen the outcome yet. I'll give it a few years until I actually admit that it's working.
Absolutely.
Before making crime a bad solution you first need a non criminal solution to survival. People don't choose criminal violence over a well paid job and a peaceful life, never.
Well, there's a lot of sociopaths in prison. About a third of the incarcerated population here in Germany iIRc. Those are a little harder to stop since they don't really care much about the peaceful part. But apart from them, yeah people don't tend to chose crime for fun.
Yes, they do.
It ends up punishing innocents and has been shown to be counterproductive in combating actual crime rates as well as recidivism.
And your alternative is to be light on crime and forgiving? That's going to yield better results?
No one suggested that. People talking about what could go wrong is different from people promoting another approach.
Like when it says "mind the gap", it's not telling you to not enter the subway.
But maybe you didn't ask honest questions but made statements disguised as loaded questions. Which is a sad thing to do.
Assuming you're genuinely interested in learning about this and not being flippant, I would encourage you to look at the corrections system in a country like Denmark: Harsh punishments do not discourage crime though, that's a fucking fact backed by empirical date that doesn't give a shit what any of us think or feel about it.
That seems counterintuitive. What do you do? Ask people pretty please not to commit crimes?
People still get in trouble, but punishments don't need to be very severe to still work. While it might seem counterintuitive, harsh sentences seem to increase recidivism and hurts society at large. This is also true for harsh conditions in prisons.
That depends on the crime and the circumstances... For gang violence social integration, education, good opportunities and guaranteed coverage of basic needs sound promising for me. You can compare different districts and ask yourself, why in some there is gang violence and in some there isnt.
It's because of people like you that countries are falling into gang violence.
Because it rarely really solves the actual problem while creating a lot of spill on damage and possibly furthering violence. See the US war on drugs or Duterte's mass executions in the Philippines for very drastic examples.
Being tough on violent gangs causes a lot of damage? Can you elaborate on this?
Drugs shouldn't be considered criminal so I agree with you there. But violence, robbery, absolutely should be incredibly enforced.
Okay, and what would "incredibly enforcing it" look like in your opinion?
You could establish longer criminal sentences. But longer sentences generally don't have a higher deterent effect and you just end up with people who have been isolated from society longer or are harder to integrate.
You could make it easier to arrest people/have criminal proceedings, but that will also mean more innocent people will be subjected to harsh measures and grow disdainful of the police.
You could increase police presence in general. But that is also likely to harbour mistrust and have more people subject to unfair scrutiny and would probably to little to prevent the crimes we are talking about here.
And mind you, all these measures will be much more likely to target migrants who already might have a not too rosy view of law enforcement and general society, so you're always risking exacerbating the same societal issues that are also contributing to the crimes.
So what exactly would you suggest?
And if you look at societies in general, those with the harshest most authoritarian rules don't really tend to be the most peaceful, crime free ones, but rather harsher rules and a harsher society tend to go in lockstep. Because violence and harshness tend to breed more violence and harshness and the fact that one of the sides enacting the violence is the state and the supposed "good guys" doesn't magically change that.
Of course that doesn't mean that there's no place for harsher laws or tougher measures in certain situations ever. But it definitely means that the harder you hit, the more precise you have to be, if you don't want things to fire back on you. Which is a lot easier said than done.
Can you provide an example?
An example for which part?
Being very hard on crime. Hand out long sentences to offenders.
Longer sentences very generally don't do much to deter crime. No criminal thinks things through with a calculator and goes "oh well, if doing this might get me into jail for three years, that's a risk I'm willing to take. But ten years? Ouwie wowie, I better not do this then!" Most people don't even think, care or know about the possible repercussions or think they will actually get caught.
Well at least they won't be around to do it again.
Well that kinda depends on whether longer sentences are more or less likely to make someone recommit crimes. If it's the former you might just end up with more people committing crimes.
If they are long enough, they won't be around to do it again
Can you provide an example of a country where harsher prison sentences made the country more peaceful?
It doesn't fix the underlying problem of why people resort to crime. Improving the economical situations of poor people, will go a much longer way in reducing crime rates.
Because the urge to just have results tends to lead to scapegoating someone and locking them up without actually addressing any of the root causes of crime, IE the cases where people fall through the cracks of society and have no route to stability except by committing crime.
To truly wage war on crime you need to wage war on desperation, something that is nigh impossible to do for most conservatives who just want to solve the problem by building more jails to throw away any hooligans being too noisy.