Neoconservatives and the rise of militarized policing

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Neoconservatives and the rise of militarized policing

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

In Ferguson, and across North America, we're seeing what a militarized police force looks like. Gas masks, military fatigues, body armor and military style weapons and armour transports have become common place in most American police departments.

There's a long history explaining how we got here. Policies that let police departments purchase military gear, signing bonuses for former soldiers to become cops, a political culture that often rewards politicians for expanding police budgets and giving cops significant lee way for dealing with protesters, rioters and 'civilians' more generally. Just the fact that 'civilian' is a widespread term used by the police for regular folks gives us a sense of how deeply the military mindset has penetrated domestic policing.

Behind all this lies a deeper tale of how our mid 20th century assumptions about crime, policing and social justice have changed over time. Things haven't always been this way. If you want to understand how we reached this point you need to go back and look at the birth of our modern law & order ideology.

This is a worthwhile exercise because in addition to telling us about the origins of military policing we also end up learning a lot about the origins of modern conservatism. (There is another side of this story that I won't focus on. That would be changes within public opinion and the rise of a popular backlash, primarily amongst the white working class, toward the 'excesses' of the welfare state. This is an issue worthy of study in its own right and I don't want to unnecessarily clutter the OP of this thread by discussing it at length. For now, just keep in mind that there are other sides to this story that we can't get into right now).

To briefly state the case: our government, media and political class use a particular kind of language to describe areas of government responsibility such as crime or economic development. Embedded within that language are implicit assumptions about how the world and the people within it work. While it sometimes feels as though government has always behaved a certain way (i.e., government has always been hard on the poor) this can obscure the specific ways in which the government acts.

In the 1960s we used a different language and a different set of assumptions to think about crime. This set of assumptions is sometimes called "penal welfarism". Whether or not everyone at the time agreed with the ideas behind penal welfarism (not everyone did) this was the framework through which cops, judges, government administrators, social workers and (liberal) elites understood the problems of crime and urban discontent.

Penal-welfarism was formed from a combination of liberal legalism, emphasizing due process and proportional punishment. It assumed that criminals could be rehabilitated through a mixture of re-education and technocratically administered welfare programs. It was an ideology that fit comfortably with a period in which the government was thought to have a mandate to curb unemployment and economic insecurity through widespread regulation and economic intervention. At it's highest level this world-view rested on the widespread adoption of Keynesian economics following the Second World War.

The following paper, available online, gives a pretty good overview of penal-welfarism as well as a detailed account of its replacement by the neoconservative / neoliberal approach:

Giuseppe Campesi, Neo-liberal and neo-conservative discourses on crime and punishment posted:

This complex was grounded in the basic theoretical assumption of positivist human sciences, that is, in the image of the homo criminalis typical of classic criminological knowledge (Beirne 1993; Pasquino 1991). Every criminal was conceived as an individual affected by some criminogenetic factor that in some way inclines him or her to crime and deviance. The nature of these criminogenetic factors has been described in different ways by different theoretical traditions, but in the postwar era it was essentially identified by reference to social and psychological determinants. From these theoretical assumptions derived the idea, imbued with the epistemological optimism typical of positivist culture, of blotting out crime by acting on its etiologic factors. This strategic objective was to be reached by means of two kinds of public-agency interventions: on the one hand by developing a sort of indirect criminal policy, aimed at what were considered to be the social and economic determinants of crime, and on the other hand by using penal agencies as rehabilitative instruments intended to affect what were considered to be the psychological determinants of crime.

This approach to the criminal question was brought into close connection with the social-democratic culture that hegemonized the political landscape of Western democracies after World War II. This was a political culture that tended to expand the semantic sphere of security, broadly understood as the idea of a general improvement in the standards of living. The classic idea of security understood as protecting the private sphere from direct threat thus shifted toward the broader idea of social security, expressing the duty of public agencies to guarantee the socioeconomic and psychological needs of individuals. As is widely known, this political culture has been confronted with a radical crisis in recent decades, a crisis closely connected with the weakening of the nation-state, which provided the political and economic framework within which to develop this ambitious project of social security. This brought about drastic changes in the political landscape of Western democracies, setting off what many consider a proper neoconservative and neoliberal political revolution (Rose 1999; Harvey 2005). This revolution profoundly affected the complex that, withGarland, has been named penal welfarism, and it wound up undermining the old optimistic idea of stamping out crime by means of social and rehabilitative programs. Under the slogan nothing works (Martinson 1974),a new criminological discourse developed, a criminological discourse that simply emphasizes the need for control and frames security as meaning the need for protection from a reality�crime�that cannot be altogether stamped out and so should at least be contained within acceptable limits.

As most of us are probably aware, postwar Keynesian economics was eventually supplanted by the ideological assumptions that most scholars refer to as neoliberalism. Here is a pretty good and extensive historical overview of the rise of neoliberal economics.

At the same time that Keynesian economics was supplanted we saw the rise of a new academic theory of crime that attacked the assumptions of penal welfarism. This new doctrine, called 'neoconservatism' ("neo" because its academic proponents were mostly former New Deal liberals, 'conservative' because it rehabilitated the dominant conservative assumptions about crime from the 19th and early 20th century).

Mike Konczal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem, Mike Konczal, "Rortybomb", nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb, Aug 15th, 2014 posted:

Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem

Before it was anything else, the neoconservative movement was a theory of the urban crisis. As a reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s, it put an ideological and social-scientific veneer on a doctrine that called for overwhelming force against minor infractions -- a doctrine that is still with us today, as people are killed for walking down the street in Ferguson and allegedly selling single cigarettes in New York. But neoconservatives also sought, rather successfully, to position liberalism itself as the cause of the urban crisis, solvable only through the reassertion of order through the market and the police.

Edward Banfield was one of the first neoconservative thinkers who started writing in the 1960s and '70s and was a prominent figure in the movement, though he isn�t remembered as well as his close friends Milton Friedman or Leo Strauss, or his star student James Q. Wilson. Banfield contributed to the beginning of neoconservative urban crisis thinking, the Summer 1969 "Focus on New York" issue of The Public Interest, which began to formalize neoconservatives� framing of the urban crisis as the result of not just the Great Society in particular but the liberal project as a whole.

In his major book The Unheavenly City (pdf here), Banfield set the tone for much of what would come in the movement. Commentary described the book as �a political scientist�s version of Milton Friedman�s Capitalism and Freedom� at the time. It sold 100,000 copies, and gathered both extensive news coverage and academic interest.

The Unheavenly City�s most infamous chapter is �Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit.� Fresh off televised riots in Watts, Detroit, and Newark, Banfield argued that it was "naive to think that efforts to end racial injustice and to eliminate poverty, slums, and unemployment will have an appreciable effect upon the amount of rioting that will be done in the next decade or two.� Absolute living standards had been rising rapidly. For Banfield, this was entirely the result of market and social forces rather than the state, and the poor, with their short time-horizons and desire for immediate gratification, would largely be left behind and always be prone to rioting. Today�s classic, if often implicit, repudiations of poor people�s humanity were clearly expressed here.

Rather than political protests or rebellions, Banfield argued that riots were largely opportunistic displays of violence and theft. He broke down four types of riots: (1) rampages, where young men are simply looking for trouble and act out violently; (2) pillaging, where theft is the main focus, and the riot serves as a solution for a type of collective action problem for thieves; (3) righteous indignation, where people act against an insult against their community; and (4) demonstrations, which are neither spontaneous nor violent but instead designed for a specific political purpose.

Banfield argued that the poor mainly engaged in the first two types of riots. Righteous indignation riots were a feature of the working class, because the �lower-class individual is too alienated to be capable of much indignation.� Demonstrations were largely the focus of the middle and upper classes, as they ran organizations and were able to make coherent claims on the state.

At this point Banfield�s text reads like a list of cranky, armchair reactionary observations about riots. It received considerable blowback at the time. What was innovative, for a neoconservative agenda, was where he put the blame. Young men will be young men, the text seems to suggest. The problem is what enables them to riot.

The initial perpetrators included the media, whose neutral (or even sensationalistic) coverage �recruited rampagers, pillagers, and others to the scene.� They also made the rioting more dangerous by expanding the knowledge base of the rioters. The larger academic community was also at fault since, to Banfield�s ear, �explaining the riots tended to justify them.� Upper-class demonstrators were also responsible for raising expectations of what the poor could demand from the state and from society writ large.

But according to Banfield, the core problem was modern liberalism, and in an interesting way. The big issue was the �professionalism� and bureaucratization of city services. The rioters had nothing to fear from the police, who were blocked from exercising their own judgement on the ground by an administrative layer of police administrators. In the logic that would form the basis of Broken Windows policing, the poor learning �through experience that an infraction can be done leads, by an illogic characteristic of childish thought, to the conclusion that it may be done.� And potential rioters were learning this because �the patrolman�s discretion in the use of force declined rapidly� with the growth of the modern liberal state.

Returning, therefore, to a �pre-professional� model of policing is one of the stated goals of Broken Windows. As James Q. Wilson explained in the 1982 Atlantic Monthly article that popularized the topic, �the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community.�

Before the modern liberal state of accountability and due process, the police force wasn't judged by �its compliance with appropriate procedures� but instead by its success in maintaining order. Since the 1960s, �the shift of police from order maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions� The order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals,� writes Wilson. According to this theory, order is preserved by the police out there, acting in the moment against minor infractions with a strong display of force, not by liberal notions of accountability and fairness.

This neoconservative vision that started in the 1960s and continues into today doesn�t just inform local arguments about policing, but rather the entire policy debate. So much of the debate over the (neo)conservative movement emphasizes suburban warriors, or evangelicals, or the Sun Belt, or the South. But as Alice O�Connor demonstrates in her paper "The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York," there was a distinct urban character to this thinking as well. Rather than a crisis of race relations, police violence, poverty, or anything else, rioting and the broader urban crisis were framed by the neoconservative movement as a crisis of values and culture precipitated by liberalism.

The broader urban crisis, in this story, hinges not on structural issues but on personal morality and behavior that can be restored by the extension of the market. Crime and urban �disorder� fit right next to social engineering and failing state institutions as a corrupt legacy of the liberal project and its bureaucratic, administrative governing state. Only the conservative agenda, as O'Connor puts it, of �zero-tolerance law enforcement, school �choice,� hard-nosed implementation of welfare reform, and the large-scale privatization of municipal and social services� is capable of dismantling it. Only through the market, individual responsibility, and freedom from government �interference� can order result from the restoration of �political and cultural authority to a resolutely anti-liberal elite.� This legacy harnesses police excess to the triumph of the market. And as we see, it will be hard to dislodge one while the other reigns supreme.

Ultimately it was conservative politicians who were able to capitalize on this shift. Using these academic theories (which 'trickled down' into the media and public) they were able to frame liberalism as the cause of rising crime, and therefore could position their own more conservative approach as the rational solution.

And so, as with so much of our contemporary world, our approach to crime developed out of the 1970s and was cemented by policy in the 1980s.

Most of us are at least broadly aware of how our society began to think and talk about economics in a new way. I think it's less appreciated that our discourse on criminals and criminality was developed at the same time and in conjunction with the new neoliberal economic paradigm. In many ways these ideologies draw upon each other. Criminals are seen as rational economic actors who commit crimes because there aren't strong enough incentives to bar them. The logical reaction is therefore to increase the penalty, and the visibility of that penalty, for committing a crime, while de-emphasizing the social or economic factors.

I think in conclusion we can see that it isn't enough for us to criticize the militarization of the police. We need to understand that underlying the policies that militarized law enforcement are a set of theoretical assumptions about human nature and the proper role of government. If we don't change those assumptions, we won't change the nature of policing.

On a final note, I think this post helps to demonstrate why its incoherent to talk about being a 'fiscal conservative and social liberal'. From day one the fiscal conservative agenda was predicated on stronger police powers to absorb the impact of reducing welfare. Cutting government programs aimed at alleviating poverty and increasing the power of the police have stronger theoretical and historical connections than many of us realize.

Helsing fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Aug 19, 2014

# ? Aug 19, 2014 19:14

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 00:34

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

Worse, the libertarian assumptions about what justifies "defensive force" are replacing the conservative / neo-conservative assumptions. It's going to get worse if that continues.

# ? Aug 19, 2014 19:36

DeeplyConcerned: Apr 29, 2008; I can fit 3 whole bud light cans now, ask me how!

Thoughtful post, however I think it's important to emphasize the more "liberal" perspective and its role in developing our crime policy in the U.S. The report you cited, Martinson (1974) was a report commissioned by the US government to study the effectiveness of the various rehabilitation programs operating at the time. One of the issues with the report is that it meta-analyzed research of wildly varying quality, with most of it being almost unusable. Martinson drew the conclusion "Taken together, there is no evidence for effectiveness", which was interpreted as "nothing works".

Of course, this appeals to the conservative ideology, but it also appealed to the liberal ideology of the time. For those who saw the root causes of crime in things like poverty, discrimination, and stigma, the results made sense because rehabilitation did not target these factors, instead trying to change the individual. They were absolutely right to point to these as contributing factors, but it's important to note that they signed on to the "nothing works" conclusion because it fit the ideology. A more nuanced perspective recognizes that social (friend group, community violence, poverty) and individual (personality, learned behavior, beliefs) factors combine with macro-level conditions to contribute to crime, and that it is possible to intervene at any or all of these areas - we need not chase the "one big solution" that explains everything.

I'll go a step further and state my personal opinion: economic factors should be downplayed in the crime policy debate. I have a couple of reasons for that.

In the first place, I have yet to see any convincing research that supports the "poverty leads to crime" trope. Obviously, there's a connection, but the vast majority of crime is not committed by people who have no other option but to turn to crime for survival. Much can be explained by a person's state of mind, their circle of friends, and other individual factors. These are factors that ordinary people can understand, and if rehabilitation is shown to be effective, you might even get neocons supporting it for budgetary reasons alone (as has been happening recently in southern states - look up recent steps towards criminal justice reform).

The more subtle reason to downplay the economic connection to crime is that it de-emphasizes the agency of the person committing the crime from the debate. This simultaneously infantalizes people who commit crime (by implying they had no choice in the matter), and (as happened before) makes realistic and workable rehabilitation programs seem less feasible by pointing to more abstract and large-scale problems as the "one big solution" to reducing crime. Obviously the rational actor argument is garbage, but it's important to intervene in the areas where we can, especially when you get those elusive findings that are scientifically accurate and appeal to people's common sense, because then you create an opportunity for a change, however small, that can shift the debate back to where it needs to be.

Another reason to lose the focus on economics is that there are real issues with inequality in the criminal justice system. But, they are features of the system itself. The system is inherently racist, inherently classist. It needs fundamental reform - the kind we were afraid to talk about when Martinson was released. By attacking a broader neoconservative ideology we ignore the specific areas where bias is exercised and oppression is exerted. Each step of the process, from surveillance, arrest, detention, charging, trying, convicting, and sentencing is sprinkled with enough racism and classism to ensure an unjust outcome. We need to think about these steps as components to a system that can be changed, and not just think of the system as a monolithic entity that was the inevitable result of neoconservative ideology.

# ? Aug 20, 2014 00:15

LogisticEarth: Mar 28, 2004; Someone once told me, "Time is a flat circle".

BrandorKP posted:

Worse, the libertarian assumptions about what justifies "defensive force" are replacing the conservative / neo-conservative assumptions. It's going to get worse if that continues.

Not really sure how this would be the case, since libertarian thought usually prohibits or strongly discourages use of force for "victimless crimes", is generaly anti-corporation, and a good chunk of right-libertarians consider proportional response incredibly important. There is a huge anti-militarization and anti-brutality undercurrent on their end too, not to mention a focus on restitution rather than a moralized punishment/revenge motivation. It might not meet your ideal but I can't see how that would be worse than the dark rabbit hole the current conservative track is taking us down.

# ? Aug 20, 2014 01:11

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

Easy MC posted:

Much can be explained by a person's state of mind, their circle of friends, and other individual factors. These are factors that ordinary people can understand, and if rehabilitation is shown to be effective, you might even get neocons supporting it for budgetary reasons alone (as has been happening recently in southern states - look up recent steps towards criminal justice reform).

How does this not have to do with poverty, though? Poverty leads to the state of mind and friends and individual factors

# ? Aug 20, 2014 02:13

Ego Death: Sep 15, 2012; by Ralp

deleted

# ? Aug 20, 2014 04:15

NLJP: Aug 26, 2004

icantfindaname posted:

How does this not have to do with poverty, though? Poverty leads to the state of mind and friends and individual factors

Relatively wealthy people steal all the time for example. They are, however, mostly sentenced and treated very leniently.

Many factors potentially lead to crime, poverty is one of them. The thing is, if you are a poor criminal you often get treated like an incorrigible missfit. It is a clear and sad double standard.

NLJP fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Aug 20, 2014

# ? Aug 20, 2014 05:26

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

LogisticEarth posted:

Not really sure how this would be the case, since libertarian thought usually prohibits or strongly discourages use of force for "victimless crimes", is generaly anti-corporation, and a good chunk of right-libertarians consider proportional response incredibly important. There is a huge anti-militarization and anti-brutality undercurrent on their end too, not to mention a focus on restitution rather than a moralized punishment/revenge motivation. It might not meet your ideal but I can't see how that would be worse than the dark rabbit hole the current conservative track is taking us down.

It's worse because violation of absolute property rights justifies "defensive force" that is basically unrestricted up to lethal force. This lets them redefine non-violent resistance as "aggression" because it violate property rights. It also lets them redefine any brutal response as "defensive action". It is definitely worse when something like a sit in can be characterized as violent aggression that justifies a lethal response.

What can be argued to be proportional to a violation of what is considered absolute? Anything. They used these very same ideas to justify to violence against civil right protestors during the civil rights movement. They justified segregation and the violent support of segregation with Liberty talk too. The anti-brutality undercurrent is a response to criticism of this. But they're able to go: these are criminals who violated property rights and fundamentally undermine society by doing so and thus they can hand wave away the anti-brutality talk when it suits them.

Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Aug 20, 2014

# ? Aug 20, 2014 15:52

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Easy MC posted:

Thoughtful post, however I think it's important to emphasize the more "liberal" perspective and its role in developing our crime policy in the U.S. The report you cited, Martinson (1974) was a report commissioned by the US government to study the effectiveness of the various rehabilitation programs operating at the time. One of the issues with the report is that it meta-analyzed research of wildly varying quality, with most of it being almost unusable. Martinson drew the conclusion "Taken together, there is no evidence for effectiveness", which was interpreted as "nothing works".

This actually touches on something that I didn't have time to cover in my initial post: part of the reason that we talk about neoconservatism is that it was a movement that was initially composed of former liberals rather than traditional conservatives.

Anyway I think you make a valuable point about the failings of the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Many liberals (and even some radicals) today look back on the 1960s and think that if we could just set the clock back to that time period we'd be in much better shape. But as you seem to be pointing out, even in that era people across the political spectrum thought the system was failing in some of its most fundamental goals.

quote:

Of course, this appeals to the conservative ideology, but it also appealed to the liberal ideology of the time. For those who saw the root causes of crime in things like poverty, discrimination, and stigma, the results made sense because rehabilitation did not target these factors, instead trying to change the individual. They were absolutely right to point to these as contributing factors, but it's important to note that they signed on to the "nothing works" conclusion because it fit the ideology. A more nuanced perspective recognizes that social (friend group, community violence, poverty) and individual (personality, learned behavior, beliefs) factors combine with macro-level conditions to contribute to crime, and that it is possible to intervene at any or all of these areas - we need not chase the "one big solution" that explains everything.

I'll go a step further and state my personal opinion: economic factors should be downplayed in the crime policy debate. I have a couple of reasons for that.

In the first place, I have yet to see any convincing research that supports the "poverty leads to crime" trope. Obviously, there's a connection, but the vast majority of crime is not committed by people who have no other option but to turn to crime for survival. Much can be explained by a person's state of mind, their circle of friends, and other individual factors. These are factors that ordinary people can understand, and if rehabilitation is shown to be effective, you might even get neocons supporting it for budgetary reasons alone (as has been happening recently in southern states - look up recent steps towards criminal justice reform).

Well, I can't really speak to the motivation behind individual crimes but I can highlight a specific situation where I think that criminal behaviour and personal survival often intersect: gangs.

I know people who have worked with "at risk" youth in my city's poorest neighbourhoods. Often times if you're a younger male then membership or affiliation with a gang is seemingly automatic based on what street or tower block you live around. Even if you don't join a given gang you can't really escape being involved in the world of gangs and if you end up in the 'wrong' part of your own neighbourhood you face the real threat of violence.

So even when you don't personally choose to be involved in the gang's activities, the gang becomes intimately tied up in your day to day life since it tends to have a prominent role in your neighbourhood and often in your school.

I also think membership in an organization like a gang becomes more attractive when you perceive that you don't have many other prospects.

quote:

The more subtle reason to downplay the economic connection to crime is that it de-emphasizes the agency of the person committing the crime from the debate. This simultaneously infantalizes people who commit crime (by implying they had no choice in the matter), and (as happened before) makes realistic and workable rehabilitation programs seem less feasible by pointing to more abstract and large-scale problems as the "one big solution" to reducing crime. Obviously the rational actor argument is garbage, but it's important to intervene in the areas where we can, especially when you get those elusive findings that are scientifically accurate and appeal to people's common sense, because then you create an opportunity for a change, however small, that can shift the debate back to where it needs to be.

Another reason to lose the focus on economics is that there are real issues with inequality in the criminal justice system. But, they are features of the system itself. The system is inherently racist, inherently classist. It needs fundamental reform - the kind we were afraid to talk about when Martinson was released. By attacking a broader neoconservative ideology we ignore the specific areas where bias is exercised and oppression is exerted. Each step of the process, from surveillance, arrest, detention, charging, trying, convicting, and sentencing is sprinkled with enough racism and classism to ensure an unjust outcome. We need to think about these steps as components to a system that can be changed, and not just think of the system as a monolithic entity that was the inevitable result of neoconservative ideology.

There's plenty to agree with here but ultimately I don't think we can really escape an economic focus, for the simple reason that a lack of jobs seems to be one of the single biggest factor behind crime. If dignified and well paying work was available to young men in these neighbourhoods and if higher education was seen as an affordable and accessible option for achieving a better life then I suspect that we wouldn't need to focus as much on rehabilitation because fewer people would become involved in criminal enterprises to begin with.

# ? Aug 20, 2014 17:30

new phone who dis: May 24, 2007; by VideoGames; Morbid Hound

Helsing posted:

There's plenty to agree with here but ultimately I don't think we can really escape an economic focus, for the simple reason that a lack of jobs seems to be one of the single biggest factor behind crime. If dignified and well paying work was available to young men in these neighbourhoods and if higher education was seen as an affordable and accessible option for achieving a better life then I suspect that we wouldn't need to focus as much on rehabilitation because fewer people would become involved in criminal enterprises to begin with.

You don't even really have to speculate about this because Industrial centers like Detriot which are now crime-ridden hellholes that used to be shining examples of how minority communities can flourish given the correct environment of opportunity. Most of the time when people like Bill Cosby are waxing philosophically about how better the black community used to be and how rotten the current culture is, they're talking about a time where economic opportunity was more abundant.

I'm not sure if higher education is the answer, though. We're currently seeing a demographic shift in the usefulness of a college degree in the employment market, and schools in low income levels aren't producing the same amount of students capable of competitive college-level learning as other areas. The country as a whole needs to decide how it's going to provide meaningful employment and living wages for entire generations full of people across all walks of life somewhere here in the near future or the tax base and ability for the government to intervene effectively is going to wilt away.

# ? Aug 20, 2014 19:35

DeeplyConcerned: Apr 29, 2008; I can fit 3 whole bud light cans now, ask me how!

quote:

How does this not have to do with poverty, though? Poverty leads to the state of mind and friends and individual factors

Poverty is related to a person's state of mind, but when it comes time to actually snatch the purse, wave the gun, or pistol-whip the cashier, there is no evidence that it's anywhere close to what we would call the actual "driving force".

Let me give a hypothetical. Say two people were both born into poverty and denied opportunity by society in a way that is truly unfair (racism, classism, etc.). Person A is pissed off, but focuses less on the fairness aspect and more on the practicalities: getting education, working harder to compensate. Person B is also pissed, but the unfairness kind of sticks in their craw. Later on, when they're wondering what to do, they're thinking "I've been unfairly treated my whole life, now it's time for the world to give me something back". Then he goes and robs the liquor store. In the literature this is called "anti-social thinking" or "criminal thinking". I don't necessarily agree with those terms but they are stronger predictors of crime than labor market conditions.

You are correct to identify the poverty as a precipitating factor. I would go farther and argue that it is the injustice that really precipitated it because the person now has a belief - I was wronged and the world owes me - that allows them to justify actions that they might not otherwise be able to. They are correct that they were wronged but society says it's not cool to take that out on a random unsuspecting person. I'm not making a value judgment on these beliefs, but evidence supports them as a very big factor in predicting who will actually commit crime, versus who is simply "at risk" in general. Compared with a broad focus, it's often more informative to get into the person's actual state of mind because then we can identify the macro and micro factors that come into play - and intervene/prevent when appropriate and necessary.

quote:

Well, I can't really speak to the motivation behind individual crimes but I can highlight a specific situation where I think that criminal behaviour and personal survival often intersect: gangs.

I know people who have worked with "at risk" youth in my city's poorest neighbourhoods. Often times if you're a younger male then membership or affiliation with a gang is seemingly automatic based on what street or tower block you live around. Even if you don't join a given gang you can't really escape being involved in the world of gangs and if you end up in the 'wrong' part of your own neighbourhood you face the real threat of violence.

So even when you don't personally choose to be involved in the gang's activities, the gang becomes intimately tied up in your day to day life since it tends to have a prominent role in your neighbourhood and often in your school.

I also think membership in an organization like a gang becomes more attractive when you perceive that you don't have many other prospects.

The assertion that gangs are self-perpetuating and "suck in" vulnerable youth is very true. It's worth thinking about how to stop their formation, recruitment, etc. But the link between economic conditions and gang formation is tenuous at best. In fact, when economic conditions are good for workers, there is more money to be spent and consequently a larger market for drugs, prostitution, etc. We can see that now in the new boom towns fracking has brought us. I would argue that a more fundamental reform would be to legalize drugs and lock the gangs out of that market, so they become a less desirable option. But I do agree with your point that we do not provide enough opportunities for kids, and more emphasis on positive youth development and education would cut down on the attractive power of gangs. That is a totally legitimate strategy and it's worth framing our education and youth development activities around how they can improve multiple aspects of life as well as preventing crime.

quote:

There's plenty to agree with here but ultimately I don't think we can really escape an economic focus, for the simple reason that a lack of jobs seems to be one of the single biggest factor behind crime. If dignified and well paying work was available to young men in these neighbourhoods and if higher education was seen as an affordable and accessible option for achieving a better life then I suspect that we wouldn't need to focus as much on rehabilitation because fewer people would become involved in criminal enterprises to begin with.

I agree with your focus on preventing crime to avoid having to do rehabilitation. That is absolutely the right way to think about this issue and there is no way that rehabilitation alone would come close to "solving" the crime problem. It's also nonsensical to ignore the factors that lead to crime, and try to "treat" people who turn to crime. However I think it's important to note that there are plenty of people (more, I would argue) who face the exact same struggles and do not turn to crime. Conversely, there 1%ers who have no problem committing every type of crime in the book although they have more than they will ever need. Ultimately, based on what I've read, the statement that poverty and a lack of jobs is the main factor influencing crime is not well supported by evidence. It's worth thinking about how to prevent these crimes, but we need to know where to intervene so we will have a specific impact on crime.

This is why I was arguing against having economics be the main focus here. Equal opportunity is an admirable goal in and of itself, and the focus on macro-level factors like economics is crucial, but there are also plenty of other factors that I think would make a bigger dent in crime and would also provide a more direct benefit.

Let me give an example. There are a whole host of factors like maternal smoking, drinking, and nutrition that can harm the developing brain, and lead to a higher probability of committing crime down the road, simply because the brain actually lacks some of the physical structures that are necessary to make good decisions in any aspect of your life (this was actually a huge issue with lead in paint, gas, and drat near everything else in recent history). If we were able to make mothers healthier by providing the resources and support they need, that alone would go a long way. Sure, you could increase the ability of the mother to get a job, buy the food, get the information she needs, but I would prefer a more direct intervention. Have a kid? Get food subsidies. Get nurse home visits, get materials and support on quitting drinking and smoking. Evidence shows that these targeted intervention and prevention efforts would lead to more dramatic reductions in crime than even the best labor market, so I think it makes more sense to focus on these issues directly, rather than hoping that increased opportunity will eventually cause a decrease in crime.

We know that these things work, but they're seen as "giving away" stuff to people who don't necessarily "deserve" it. I think that's where the economic outlook is most useful in the crime debate. We really need to work on getting people to see the light on this issue. The reality is that you can be a dick, and refuse to give an "undeserving" single mom food, and resources, and then you can pay for it six fold down the road when you're in the hospital from getting pistol whipped by her crazy rear end kid. That's what we're doing now. Or, you can pay a couple of bucks now and have a safer, healthier society full of smarter, more productive and engaged citizens.

# ? Aug 20, 2014 20:22

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

LogisticEarth posted:

Not really sure how this would be the case, since libertarian thought usually prohibits or strongly discourages use of force for "victimless crimes", is generaly anti-corporation, and a good chunk of right-libertarians consider proportional response incredibly important. There is a huge anti-militarization and anti-brutality undercurrent on their end too, not to mention a focus on restitution rather than a moralized punishment/revenge motivation. It might not meet your ideal but I can't see how that would be worse than the dark rabbit hole the current conservative track is taking us down.

Others discussed the theories, but I think you also have to look at what's being adopted too. I mean, our system isn't 100% neoconservative work camps to death - we at least acknowledge it is possible to rehabilitate, we provide at least some resources, we don't just keep them in a pen (yet). A common thread in a lot of conservative poo poo has been to adopt ideas from the libertarians that sound good and wear them as a cloak over the same old poo poo, but now it sounds better - didn't you hear Rand Paul talk for twelve hours about how drones are bad? - except, of course, his problem is they aren't being used to shoot people running out of liquor stores with a stolen bottle of whiskey.

So it can be worse because they'll take the parts out of libertarianism that buttress the current system, and ignore the rest (or only apply them when dealing with upper-class crime).

# ? Aug 20, 2014 21:52

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

More from Rortybomb. I've bolded what I think is the most interesting paragraph (which is itself a quotation from a 1980s article by James Q Wilson, the principle originator of the 'broken windows' theory)

quote:

The Conservative World View and Prison Populations, Broken Windows.

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Mike

Tim Carney asks, as a New Year�s resolution, to not to do battle with faceless ideologies. Carney is interjecting into a specific problem, that of the conservative movement and prison population. Carney:

quote:
But on Twitter, Serwer repeatedly characterized the �conservative approach to crime� and claimed the �conservative record on crime is clear and easy to evaluate,� dismissing Freire�s objections that such a record might be more complex than he thinks because, well, different conservatives have different views.

This was just another instance of the sort of head-butting we constantly see on blogs. Complaining about �liberals� or �conservatives� being inconsistent is a waste of time.

What Serwer is doing isn�t a gotcha point. A lot of conservative energy, thought, money, infrastructure, ideology and worldview is built around the idea of a high prison population, harsh sentencing minimums, and a casual disregard towards the idea of �Rights� in the maintenance of order, and as such it�s not going to be trivial to pull back on that.

Or to put it a different way, when several friends have mentioned that prison reform might be a GOP priority in 2011, all I can think is �The Tea Party is going to get behind putting young, African-American men back on the streets and back into their communities? Are we watching the same group of organized, older, affluent-but-vulnerable white men?�

But maybe this will enter the public debate, and as such I need to start organizing my thoughts on it. Let�s walk through why I think we can think of our current prison population dilemma as a conservative project. This is a rough draft.

First. Let�s post one of my favorite charts I made in 2010 � we�ll do a top 5 next week! � a cross-section of countries and the strong correlation between their prison population per capita and an index of their �economic freedoms�, with a plot of the United States since 1970 over it:

(Sources: one, two.) There�s been a massive explosion in the rate of prison population in the United States since 1970. Empirical work has found that states with a Republican governor and Republican legislatures show a greater increase in incarcerated populations, and that the effect is stronger in the 1990s.

Second. I like reading David Frum. One thing that surprised me was that he listed James Q Wilson�s Thinking about Crime (1975) as one of his Top Five Books on Core Conservative Philosophy. Why is this a philosophical book for movement conservatives?

quote:

[Frum:] One of the things [Wilson] argued is that the supply of crime is not infinite, that is, the crimes are done by relatively small numbers of people. If you can get those people off the streets � incapacitation is the technical term � you can make a big difference and that�s, in fact, exactly what happened�.

Why is this a conservative book?

It�s a conservative book because of its mood. Its mood is unsentimental. It does not believe there is greater virtue at the bottom of society, it doesn�t accept conventional excuses, it doesn�t make racism the centre of the American story. Also, because it�s willing to contemplate the effective use of state punitive power to solve a social problem�.

The older conservatives were primarily literary intellectuals � Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver�What the neoconservatives brought to politics was the application of social science to social problems. What made them conservative was, as Mrs Thatcher said, that the facts of life are conservative. They are social scientists, they use social-science methods, they are interested in the governance of society and public policy.

Third. Let�s leave aside the empirical dubiousness of the Broken Windows approach working. I want to look at the ideology. Here�s Wilson popularizing his idea in a very influential 1982 Atlantic Monthly article:

quote:

We suggest that �untended� behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other�s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed�

The process we call urban decay has occurred for centuries in every city. But what is happening today is different in at least two important respects. First, in the period before, say, World War II, city dwellers- because of money costs, transportation difficulties, familial and church connections�could rarely move away from neighborhood problems�Now mobility has become exceptionally easy for all but the poorest or those who are blocked by racial prejudice. Earlier crime waves had a kind of built-in self-correcting mechanism: the determination of a neighborhood or community to reassert control over its turf�.

Second, the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested �on suspicion� or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. �Rights� were something enjoyed by decent folk, and perhaps also by the serious professional criminal, who avoided violence and could afford a lawyer.

This pattern of policing was not an aberration or the result of occasional excess. From the earliest days of the nation, the police function was seen primarily as that of a night watchman: to maintain order against the chief threats to order�fire, wild animals, and disreputable behavior. Solving crimes was viewed not as a police responsibility but as a private one. In the March, 1969, Atlantic, one of us (Wilson) wrote a brief account of how the police role had slowly changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes. The change began with the creation of private detectives (often ex-criminals), who worked on a contingency-fee basis for individuals who had suffered losses. In time, the detectives were absorbed in municipal agencies and paid a regular salary simultaneously, the responsibility for prosecuting thieves was shifted from the aggrieved private citizen to the professional prosecutor. This process was not complete in most places until the twentieth century.

The idea of a police force that solved crimes rather than one that maintained order was the result of the private detectives industry being absorbed into police forces and the professionalization of lawyers and prosecutors. But that was an accident that needs to be fixed. The police force isn�t there to investigate crimes, present evidence to a prosecutor who then presents evidence to a jury. By the time that is important the rot and decay of social disorder has set in and it is too late. There are sharp distinctions between �decent folk� and criminals, families and outsiders, etc.

There�s an important rhetorical trick that the Broken Window ideology brought to the table, one that caught progressives off-guard and brought in liberals hook-line-and-sinker. As Bernard Harcourt has noted, it transforms the idea of offensive acts into harmful acts. Public drinking and loitering aren�t harms, but they are offensive to some. Broken Windows allowed people to believe the notion that offensive behavior created (by creating the potentials for and inevitability of) legal harms. It also became backwards compatible, with people being able to think that harmful acts were obviously preceded by an offensive act; criminalize and ruthless prosecute the offensive acts, and you can prevent the real harms from taking place.

Fourth: The conservative movement is pretty fantastic in how patient they (and their funders!) are. This was churning out there for a few decades before it was turned into the �Taking Back Our Streets Act� part of the 1994 manifesto for the conservative takeover of the House, the Contract with America, which planted the flag on what had happened in the 1980s and set the tone for how crime would be fought from that point on:

quote:

The bill embodies the Republican approach to fighting crime: making punishments severe enough to deter criminals from committing crimes, making sure that the criminal justice system is fair and impartial for all, and making sure that local law enforcement officials (who are on the streets every day), and not Washington bureaucrats direct the distribution of federal law enforcement funds�.

Opponents of strict sentencing laws like these argue that �locking people up� does not address the problem of why crimes are committed in the first place. Evidence suggests, however, that there is a strong correlation between increased incarceration and decreased crime rates: from 1990-1991, states with the greatest increases in criminal incarceration rates experienced, on average, a 12.7 percent decrease in crime, while the 10 states with the weakest incarceration rates experienced an average 6.9 percent increase in crime.

Death Penalty Provisions (Title I)�Mandatory Minimum Sentencing for Drug Crimes (Title II)�Mandatory Victim Restitution (Title III)�Reform of the Exclusionary Rule (Title VI)�.Prisoner Lawsuits (Title VII)..Deportation of Criminal Aliens (Title VIII)�

This is a wishlist of what the conservative movement wanted when it took control of Congress in 1994, and it provides that landscape that everyone is dealing with now. Large prison populations. Mandatory minimums. Huge restitution burdens on the newly released. A drug war that pushes the Bill of Rights every chance it gets (the pushing for movement on the Exclusionary Rule).

I see Carney�s point that not everyone agreed or agrees. (You can see the Cato�s Policy Handbook for 1995 on Crime for a dissent towards the federalization, overcrowding, and doubling-down on the war on drugs that this course entailed.) But this is the center of the movement, and this is where the movement got results.

And it all goes back to the issue of police needing to use force, even at the costs of so-called �Rights�, to maintain social order combined with the idea that there are just a few bad people out there who are harming the decent folks. When those bad people are removed, a full community can flourish. Offensive acts form the basis of harmful acts. It�s a very conservative view of both why there is crime and how to fix it, and simply throwing a few technocratic fixes here and there to preserve state budgets won�t necessarily displace it or the infrastructure, ideologies and people that put it into place.

I add some additional thoughts here.

# ? Aug 22, 2014 06:57

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

quote:

A Little More on Prisons, Incapacitation and Conservative Thought.

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Mike

A little bit more for the previous post. First check out this post about conservatives and crime by Adam Serwer.

It�s important to expand on why, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, how much the ascendant conservative approach to crime involved a large prison population. Here�s the big quote from James Q. Wilson in the closing to his 1975 book, Thinking About Crime (my bold):

quote:
. . . some persons will shun crime even if we do nothing to deter them, while others will seek it out even if we do everything to reform them. Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people. And many people, neither wicked nor innocent, but watchful, dissembling, and calculating of their opportunities, ponder our reaction to wickedness as a cue to what they might profitably do. We have trifled with the wicked, made sport of the innocent, and encouraged the calculators. Justice suffers, and so do we all.

Go Team Social Science! I�m going to go out on a limb and say that the statement �wicked people exist� (when they were born?) and there�s nothing to be done about them other than to store them is neither rigorously thought out or proven, but it�s been the de facto approach to crime for the past 30 years.

By the way, there�s a lot of effort in preventing disorder from setting in for communities, but what is disorder? Since it is the core of the theory, I went ahead and assumed that these conservative social scientists would have a very rigorous and well-thought out definition of what constitutes disorder that isn�t just projecting class, ethnic and sexual biases onto outside populations. From James Q. Wilson�s Varieties of Police Behavior: the Management of Law and Rrder in Eight Communities (1968):

quote:

The patrolman confronting a citizen is especially aleter to two kinds of cues: those that signal danger and those that signal impropriety. A badly dressed, rough-talking person, especially one accompanied by friends and in his own neighborhood, is quickly seen as a potential threat-he may, out of his own hot temper or because of the need to �prove himself� in front of his buddies, pull a knife or throw a punch. A teenager hanging out on a street corner late at night, especially one dressed in an eccentric manner, a Negro wearing a �conk rag� (a piece of cloth tied around the head to hold flat hair being �processed� � that is, straightened), girls in short skirts and boys in long hair parked in a flash car talking loudly to friends on the curb, or interracial couples-all�

The patrolman believes with considerable justification that teenagers, Negros, and lower-income persons commit a disproportionate share of all reported crimes; being in those population categories at all makes one, statistically, more suspect than other persons; but to be on those categories and to behave unconventionally is to make oneself a prime suspect.

The word �and� in the last sentence is in italics in the original. It seems that behaving �unconventionally� forms a core part of the idea of disorder � but notice in the first paragraph how wearing a rag on one�s head while it is being straightened is strongly implied to being �unconventional� and thus disorderly � unconventional for whom?

Krugman asks:

quote:

[W]hat happened to the inevitable collapse of American society?

All through the 70s and 80s, and some way into the 90s, it was almost a given that all of America � or at least all of our central cities � would turn into something like the South Bronx, or worse. It was practically a cliche of popular culture; it was also a theme propounded solemnly and at great length by writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb, who insisted that only a return to traditional moral values could arrest our decline.

And then a funny thing happened. Values continued to shift: we kept on having premarital sex and getting divorces, gay and lesbian couples went out in public, relatively few Americans went to church (although a larger number claimed that they went.) Yet crime declined sharply, big cities (New York in particular) became safer than they had been in many decades, and in general society seemed to hold together.

I don�t think we really know why all that happened. But the failure of dystopia to appear on schedule is one of the remarkable good things about modern America.

This leads us to our last link, which may be my favorite. Bob Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America�s War Against Crime and Drugs. (1996). From a review by Jerome Skolnick, The American Prospect, reviewing, 1997:

quote:

�America�s beleaguered cities,� the authors declare, �are about to be victimized by a paradigm shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call �the superpredators.'� They write: �A new generation of street criminals is upon us�the youngest, biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known.� And they predict that the next generation will be even more predatory, with juvenile crime peaking in 2010�.

Consider carefully the claims that the authors of Body Count make about prisons. �Virtually all convicted criminals who go to prison,� they write, �are violent offenders, repeat offenders, or repeat violent offenders.� �It is simply a myth,� they continue, �that our prison cells are filled with people who don�t belong there, or that we would somehow be safer if fewer people were in prison. The widespread circulation of that myth is the result of ideology masquerading as analysis.�

�Moral poverty,� by contrast, ignores such factors as racism, joblessness, inequality, and poverty and zeroes in only on �the near complete collapse of our character-forming institutions . . . in a free society, families, schools, and churches.� Consequently, the bonds of family must be �restored.� How do we achieve this restoration? �We believe,� the authors write, �the most obvious answer�and perhaps the only reliable answer�is a widespread renewal of religious faith and the strengthening of religious institutions.�

Here�s a solid prediction from the mid-1990s: If we don�t have a widespread renewal of religious faith then crime committed by �superpredators� would dominate, peaking in 2010. Looking out my window, I see falling crime statistics for a long time now and no roving gang of �pre-social� (their word!) superpredators.

For one explanation on what actually happened during that time period, check out this by Bruce Western.

# ? Aug 22, 2014 07:16

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 00:34

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

"It does not believe there is greater virtue at the bottom of society"
"it�s willing to contemplate the effective use of state punitive power to solve a social problem"
"When those bad people are removed, a full community can flourish."

So we've got:

Poor people are bad, don't have virtue and commit crimes
We can and should use state force against them
They should be removed from society and this will be a good for society.

and the cherry on top is that the bottom of society is:

"interracial couples" "teenagers, Negros, and lower-income persons" are the bottom of society

Ignoring the question of which ideology this really is, this seem like a straight line to current events.

Oh God that Cato economic freedom chart. Charles Koch's investments paying out.

# ? Aug 22, 2014 15:56

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Neoconservatives and the rise of militarized policing