John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi write,
Liberal political values can shape and distort the research that criminologists do and the public positions that they take. Lee Ellis and Anthony Walsh surveyed several hundred criminologists and found that self-reported ideological perspective was strongly associated with the type of theory that the scholar most often advocated, with liberal criminologists primarily supporting theories that locate the causes of crime in social and economic deprivation. Coauthor John Wright has recently collected data showing that political ideology predicts almost perfectly the policy positions of criminologists. On issues ranging from gun control to capital punishment to three-strikes laws, liberal criminologists showed almost no variation in their beliefs. (Needless to say, they dislike guns, oppose punitive sentences, and vehemently object to the death penalty.)
Of course, it was Robert Nozick who coined the term “normative sociology” as the study of what the causes of problems ought to be.
Later, the authors write,
Reliable evidence tells us that the most effective strategies to reduce crime involve police focusing on crime hot spots, targeting active offenders for arrest, and helping to solve local problems surrounding disorder and incivility. Putting predatory, recidivistic offenders in jail or in prison remains the best way to protect the public—especially those who live in high-crime neighborhoods.
Some day, we will view incarceration as inhumane. But until we come up with an effective alternative, I fear that we will find that non-incarceration is even more inhumane.
My fear about academic economics is that it will evolve in the direction of criminology. I foresee ever-increasing social pressure within the community of academic economists to undertake research that confirms left-wing biases.
I don’t see what’s so bad about incarceration, but then again I don’t see what’s so bad about the death penalty either.
I would say the same about corporeal punishment. I’m sure many criminals would rather take a few ladies than spend months in a cell.
My intuitions about punishments are in line with yours, but am still distrubed that the US has such a *large amount* of incarceration compared to the rest of the world.
I am also broadly on board with what AK says reduces crime. “Putting *predatory, recidivistic* offenders in jail …”. But notice those adjectives. There are probably a lot of petty offenders who are not predatory or recidivistic.
Sometimes a group consensus turns out to be bogus because it derives from social factors (including ideological, normative, and political) and mechanisms (rewarding cooperators, punishing defectors, and excluding dissenters) instead of adherence to rigorous standards of empirical epistemology and intellectual inquiry. If conditions are right, groups tend to become increasingly homogeneous with regard to adherence to a whole suite of beliefs, for example, through a process like “evaporative cooling / concentration,” and gradually throwing off all those who deviate. Eventually one ends up with something more like a tribe or cult that is much more interested in punishing heretics, blasphemers, and apostates than it is in self-criticism and self-correction, and other classical values relating to the knowledge-production process.
Some scholarly disciplines operate enough like selective social groups, guilds, and clubs that members can be exposed to the same pressures and mechanisms. And that means something that looks like an “expert consensus” that carries the power of the argumentum ad verecundiam and the imprimatur of reliability our society gives to “General agreement among prestigious expert authorities using Science to discover objective Truth,” can still be totally bogus, but in a way that is hard to detect or demonstrate from the outside of the club. And given the group dynamics and high status of members of the club, it is such that one will experience severe negative social consequences if he or she even makes the attempt. That’s “Academic Social Failure.”
Thus, there is a quite urgent need for heterodox sociologists to introvert and turn their gaze on the sociology of academia itself and to develop a (hopefully accurate and reliable) body of scholarly research regarding “Academic Social Failure,” that is, how it is possible for entire academic disciplines to go off the rails, when that tends to occur, how to know when it has happened or is in the process of occurring, and so forth.
There is a requirement for some thing that reasonable outsiders can respectably point to in order to express disagreement with a field’s expert consensus without being written off as an ideologue arguing in bad faith, or crank, or worse, but at the same time, doesn’t give ammunition for actual cranks to justify a radical dismissal of everything is favor of even worse beliefs based in their own social failures (or cognitive deficiencies).
This is a profoundly hard problem, and it’s quite possible there is just no possible solution for “outsiders”, and only “heterogeneity quotas” or procedural mechanisms similar to those employed in adversarial legal systems have any chance of creating the possibility of “reliable structural disruption” to break up instances of “social congealing and consolidation” that eventually lead to Academic Social Failure.
But the time to take the problem with deadly seriousness and was at least ten years ago.
I have long held a fantasy of there being some remote cold island like Iceland that would be prison. There would be no walls, no bars, no true incarceration. We would take repeated violent offenders and drop them on the island with a backpack, and that would be the last we see of them. No money involved in operating this exile except to patrol the island to make sure they don’t build boats and sail away. The criminals would be completely free as long as they stayed on the island. There would be many criminals on the island, so they would need to form their own society and economy. They would learn that being productive rather than predatory is hard work. Maybe they would learn to be decent people.
“Maybe they would learn to be decent people.”
Snake Plissken has bad news for you.
“Some day, we will view incarceration as inhumane. But until we come up with an effective alternative, I fear that we will find that non-incarceration is even more inhumane.”
There are plenty of alternatives that are currently technologically feasible. Super “ankle bracelets” could record everything and provide real-time telemetry to law enforcement, making it impossible to get away with any crimes. It would also act as a kind of “scarlet letter” social signal and would impose a certain amount of social isolation (as in the famous twilight zone episode) both from those who want to avoid convicts, and also those who want to avoid being recorded.
But then standards will just shift again, and someone is going to complain about how the social ostracization is inhumane. Then if the government makes them invisible or easily concealable, someone else will complain about the loss of privacy being inhumane.
The concept by itself has no objective standard and is thus susceptible to being a fashionable social construct that will keep ratcheting upward no matter what anyone does. The best one can do to introduce a logically or empirically limiting principle is to say that the state should impose penalties that are as humane as possible, so long as the goals of public safety, security, and order are effectively delivered as a matter of an equal right belonging to residents of any community.
That is, instead of “let the punishment fit the crime,” we could say, “let the punishments fit the needs of public order,” which would allow severity to vary on the basis of context of time and place, and not just on the details of the offender’s past and the underlying criminal activity.
The problem with those arguing that we should empty the prisons is that they have no expectation (or intention) of being held accountable for any consequences. Of course that’s the “lack of discipline of bullshit from having no skin in the game” problem with open public advocacy in general.
The concepts of “human dignity” and “equality” and “justice” are used in the same way as “humanity.” All of these concepts lack objective standards and can be indefinitely ratcheted upward, in a wide range of policy fields, to satisfy the vanity and power-hunger of their proponents.
I find it hard to credit any criminology article that
(a) claims that increasing incarceration has been a key driver of the reduction in crime rates since the early ’90s
(b) does not even mention reductions in environmental lead levels as an alternative explanation.
The lead-crime hypothesis may or may not be right, but it is sufficiently plausible and sufficiently well-known that an intellectually honest alternative thesis should at least respond to it. In general it is a troubling sign when an author spends so much time psychoanalyzing their opponents without also answering their strongest arguments.
So they are rational. GTK. It would be worse if they weren’t, but then again, reality has a liberal bias.
Who? Criminologists? Apparently not. That’s, like an important point of the article.
And a word to the wise: repeating tired self-congratulatory slogans to yourself isn’t a hallmark of intellect.
Here is the conclusion on which I will base my facts. —Adlai Stevenson