A reader forwarded this story to me under the heading of TLP Watch.
“At some point, you have to address the underlying issues of racism and classism,” said Daryl Atkinson, a former staff attorney at the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services and co-director of Forward Justice, a civil rights advocacy organization. “Otherwise we’re kind of putting a Band-Aid on cancer.”
Carroll, who has helped restructure public defense systems in 15 states, has heard reactions like Atkinson’s from many liberal reform advocates. But he says looking at the issue through the lens of big government overreach—or what he calls “the tyranny prism”—may provide results that the left ultimately cannot argue with, even though it means sacrificing a central tenet of their ideology.
The point of the story is that conservatives (actually, libertarians) have been more effective than progressives at promoting criminal justice reforms. Libertarians frame the issue using the liberty-coercion axis, while progressives frame it using the oppressor-oppressed axis.
Can the following research be filed under any of the three languages of politics?:
“Abstract
This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43% and it also increases the probability that offenders are identified. We thereby estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to the detection probability to be -2.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by more than 2%. We also find that DNA registration makes offenders more likely to find employment, enroll in education, and live in a more stable family environment.”
—Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleacy, and Rasmus Landersø, The effects of DNA databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders, (MS, March 2019)
Available online at the link below:
https://justicetechlab.github.io/jdoleac-website/research/DNA_Denmark.pdf
John, I would argue the Danish study could be put under heading incentives (even negative ones) matter. Or criminals aren’t dumb, they don’t commit crimes if they are going to be caught. Directly contrary most liberal attempts to reform criminal justice system (reduce punishment).
Michael,
I agree with your points about incentives and intelligence.
But does your 3rd point follow, that the findings of the Danish study are contrary to liberal attempts to reform the criminal justice system by reducing punishment? Compare the fascinating study by Daniel S. Nagin, “Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists,” Annual Review of Economics 5 (2013) 83-105. Here are pertinent excerpts:
“Since Bentham and Beccaria, three key concepts underlay theorizing about deterrence—the certainty, severity, and immediacy (celerity) of punishment.Certainty refers to the probability of legal sanction given commission of crime; severity refers to the onerousness of the legal consequences given a sanction is imposed; and celerity refers to the lapse in time between commission of the crime and its punishment. [Gary] Becker’s model and most of its progeny in economics focus only on certainty and severity […]. […] there is far more empirical support for the deterrent effect of changes in the certainty of punishment than changes in the severity of punishment. […] certainty must result in a distasteful consequence for it to be a deterrent. The consequences need not be draconian, just sufficiently costly, to deter the proscribed behavior.” (at pp. 85 and 87)
Available online at the link below:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-economics-072412-131310
And perhaps swiftness (celerity) of punishment, combined with certainty, would further reduce the optimal severity of punishment for deterrence. Let’s hope that economists and criminologists will contrive ways to study the ‘celerity’ variable.
Would liberals endorse a package of reforms that increase certainty of punishment (e.g., by adding offenders to DNA databases) and swiftness of punishment (by procedural reforms and/or major expansion of courts), but reduces severity of punishment?
I hasten to add that punishment in criminal justice has also other goals, apart from deterrence: retribution (i.e., to restore a balance), incapacitation (i.e., to prevent a convict from committing new crimes against citizens at large, at least for a period), rehabilitation, and community communication (i.e., ‘this is how wrong what you did is’).
Let’s leave aside the portion of the criminal pool that suffers from mental illness. Institutionalism of some kind is inevitable there, if only because they will end up in jail if we do nothing.
For the rest, what’s the best way to make sure that criminals are caught quickly? Likely things that violate civil rights. I’m not saying this means its bad or that our current balance on this issue is correct, only that we could probably catch close to 100% of criminals if we wanted to.
What would make punishment and crime closer together? Probably granting defendants less rights in the courtroom. Same issues as above.
What would be the swiftest and easily understood form of punishment? Probably corporal punishment. Why a long prison sentence when a few lashes of the whip would probably have a much stronger effect and not take someone out of society for so long.
So add it all up. The most effective system is one where a surveillance/police state railroads people in court and imposes sharp physical pain on convicts. It’s not theoretical, that’s basically how things work in Singapore. Japan has a 99% conviction rate. Etc.
Of course the idea that we could do that here is absurd. If anything the total opposite of all those things is what progressives want. And we all know what a racial impact all this would have.
Even if it would be better for all involved, including the criminals, I doubt the most effected groups could handle the ego/status hit involved.
So do you support the Singaporean model to solve the opioid crisis as well?
I find Singapores drug/vice policy to be the best I’ve seen. If a drug is particularly “hard” it’s outlawed completely and the government does what it takes to make sure no illegal market ever develops for it.
If a drug is “soft” (like alcohol) and already has a deep market embedded in the culture they legalize it but heavily tax/regulate it. They take the same attitude with gambling.
Most consumption takes the form of the 80/20 rule, and if something is legal the 20% generating the 80% of the profits will usually go through the legal routes. This starves off the demand that might create an illegal market, which makes it all the easier for Singapore to suppress the illegal market.
The increase in price/inconvenience also tends to keep poorer and more vulnerable citizens away from such vices, or at least reduces their consumption. So for instance you’ll pay $20 for a drink at a bar, $10 during happy hour. If you are a citizen who wants to use a casino you have to pay $1000 or so a year to gain entrance (I’m going on memory here).
This is especially true of situations prone to abuse. Here in the USA alcohol sales are stopped in say the 7th inning/4th quarter of sports games so people sober up before driving.
Note: (The libertarian version of this can be seen by Googling “10 cent beer night”.)
Similar steps to avoid intoxication in vulnerable contexts are taken in Singapore. They also respect the local autonomy of the different ethnic groups cultures, for instance you can’t drink at all in public in the Muslim neighborhoods.
As for opioids, Singapore has had much success making sure that 5% of the USA per capita rate.
This sort of evidence based approach to drugs/vice makes the most sense. It is neither a libertarian free wheeling approach that thinks the “war on drugs” is the cause of every single problem in our society, nor is it just making everything illegal all the time regardless of the reasonability and likely effects of trying to enforce.
So the next time you (asdf) rant about Purdue Pharma exploiting those employed in jobs involving physical labor we can remind you that zero tolerance urine tests, caning, and the death penalty is your preferred policy for dealing with opioid misuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore)
I don’t know about all of these amounts, but for morphine the lowest level to be considered “trafficking” was still above a pretty high single months dose for a normal user. To get the death penalty you would need to illegally be in possession of far greater amounts than an individual could ever take (i.e. you are a dealer).
Like most places, Singapore has recognized that enforcement focused at the point of the user is inefficient and it focuses on the dealers.
If you think I support the death penalty for say people who ran opioid pill mills in this country, I do.
asdf, I didn’t focus on the death penalty alone, I also mentioned zero tolerance urine tests and caning. Your Wikipedia link states:
I’ve never heard about the enlightened attitude in which . I’ll take your word for it, maybe you should try to update the Wikipedia page.
You’ve made your case for authoritarian corporal punishment, now apply your principles consistently with those who misuse opioids. After all, these are mostly low IQ people, no? What does the Bell Curve have to say about the correlation between IQ and drug abuse?
When I went to Singapore, I was not subject to any random urine tests. I’m thinking people aren’t grabbed off the street for random drug testing without cause.
If you are brought in on cause (say, because you are acting intoxicated in public and causing a nuisance) and a urine test shows you to be breaking the law, what would you say should happen?
In general I think that a couple of whacks of the cane is better than a prison sentence.
asdf, I don’t think you appreciate that caning is a flesh tearing experience. Personally I am not a fan of torture.
I’m aware of what caning does.
When you break the law, something has to happen. If the law being broken is serious enough that the only other alternative is jail time, then I don’t think it’s wrong to consider corporal punishment.
We all seem to agree that imprisonment seems to have huge detrimental effects. In cases other then where incapacitation is the goal, I’m not sure why you aren’t looking for alternatives.
Increasing immediacy/celerity runs into the practices of the American criminal justice system. As one example, trials are never scheduled until the affected lawyers are free. Should they find the date inconvenient at any point, a “request for continuance” is pretty much automatically granted.
runs into the practices of the American criminal justice system
Yes. And much of our current system is “punishment by process”: the time lags and attendant restrictions on behavior are punishments in themselves.
I think DNA Registry Expansion can be filed under the freedom-coercion axis but only indirectly and with some additional explanation for clarity. Kling’s three languages of politics (TLP) only focuses on differences in ideology in order to uniquely identify each group. The TLP does not emphasize similarities. Both progressives and libertarians support civil liberties including strong privacy provisions.
The DNA Registry Expansion policy involves a tradeoff between reducing criminal violence (individual coercion) and increasing the risk of privacy violations by institutions (government coercion) and/or individual law enforcement officers. For me, my support for new proposals like these comes down evaluating the tradeoffs using the available evidence. I don’t trust my TLP-style instincts in these cases involving tweaks to a mature system.
I think Kling’s public defense reform example involves an equally complex set of tradeoffs for libertarians and fiscal conservatives to consider. I think part of the reform should involve attempts at increasing the productivity of legal cases in general (i.e. lowering costs) but that may just be wishful thinking.
Libertarians are better than Progressives on criminal justice partially because of the ‘Only Nixon can go to China’ reality and anybody who discusses the history of this issue with older Democrats will have to remember 1988. Remember Republicans painted Willie Horton as Michael Dukasis running mate? So smart Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, got tough on crime during the 1990s. (And yes without the Horton ad, Bush Sr. wins 1988 but it is obvious the Bush campaign thought this was the strongest attack ad of 1988 because they released after the Convention bump.)
1) You want Republicans to continue to go after Grandparents, and I believe older voters like their local politicians to be Tough On Crime. This is one reason I think criminal justice reform will have limited success.
2) One of the local political stepping stones for a future House, Senate, and Governor is District Attorney positions where it is your job to be tough on crime.
3) Progressives can NOT to make criminal justice about race, then they labeled Identity Politics. Libertarians can make this point without this label.
I’m not so sure about this. Progressives could be – sometimes are – ecumenical in pursuit of criminal justice reform. But they usually insist on making it entirely about race (and then abandoning any sense of discrimination between the Eric Garners and the Michael Browns). So I don’t think it is that libertarians *can* get away with doing something progressives can’t. It’s that they tend to choose to pursue it a different (in my opinion better) manner that is more principled and general in its appeal. Perhaps one could say that the left is constrained in its approach by electoral politics, and that the need to racialize the issue to fully use it to drive up black voter turnout filters down into the general ideology.
Sure libertarians can be more principled here but I see a lot of identifying the problem in the article but not real movement either. More public defender hours is the goal? And this sort has been on the docket for discussion the last 5 – 7 years and all it has accomplished is a few Trump pardons. So unfortunately the political process is slow in motion here and it suffers from two type of constituents that normally don’t ally with each other. (Libertarians and minority voters)
And again, I still believe the biggest roadblock is that better criminal justice does not campaign well with a lot of local elections and there are lot voters that like Tough On Crime from their state officials.
Libertarians have fewer reasons to throw people in jail.
Gee, thanks a lot, libertarians. Just what we need to increase the liberty of law-abiding people – more violent criminals on the street. (Sorry, I’m not buying the fairy tale that prisons contain thousands of kids doing hard time for smoking joints outside Dead concerts.)
I suspect libertarians gravitate to the socially destructive causes on which they can ally with the Left – criminal justice “reform,” pot legalization, unrestricted immigration – because the rest of their agenda is going absolutely nowhere.
And the success libertarians have had on this criminal justice “reform” disaster-in-the-making has little to do with the rhetoric they have used – more to do with the support of fat cats like the Koch brothers, the venality of Republican congressmen, and the pliability of a dimwitted, rudderless Republican president who can be talked into anything by his vacuous limousine-liberal daughter and son-in-law.
XYZ: We can see your axis.
I’m happy to be on whatever “axis” is opposed to innocent people being victimized by violent criminals. I would have thought that people who claim “liberty” as their core value would be opposed to that, as well.
The success of the (socialists) Progressives remains in their ability to tribalize crime – those who commit crimes are first off members of a race group, or a class group. And membership in such groups means an automatic mitigating circumstance. The oppressed, the victims, become both morally superior, yet also less guilty and less responsible for any criminal actions.
In fact, criminals are all individuals, and need to be treated as such — but generally are not, or not so much as is optimal.
“Racism” will continue to be a problem as long as there are a lot more (anecdotally significant?) criminals of any one racial group. We need to be more honest about the need to treat all humans as individuals, including holding them equally responsible for criminal behavior.
In the meantime, more certain and especially more swift punishment that is less severe would be better at reducing crime. I support a lot more DNA testing and tracking of criminals to increase the likelihood of them getting caught.
djf,
Re: “I suspect libertarians gravitate to the socially destructive causes on which they can ally with the Left – criminal justice “reform,” pot legalization, unrestricted immigration – because the rest of their agenda is going absolutely nowhere.”
Libertarians have focussed squarely also on deregulation. According to Casey Mulligan (U. of Chicago), who recently completed a stint as chief economist in the Council of Economic Advisors, there has been substantial deregulation—or at least more than ‘absolutely going nowhere.’
See Mulligan’s summary at his blogpost at the link below:
http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-brief-summary-of-activities-in.html
Yes, we now have a Republican president, so we’ve had deregulation since he’s been in office – not because of libertarian advocacy, but because that’s just what Republican presidents do, to please the party’s corporate constituency, which is not particularly “libertarian,” just self-interested. (Which is not to disparage the idea of deregulation itself.)
Libertarians are like dogs chasing cars, imagining that the cars are fleeing their fearsome barking.
As far as I can tell, most libertarians stick to their ideas, and sometimes the stars align to help and shape policy change in one area or another; for example, elimination of the military draft in the 1970s, deregulation of some industries in the 1980s, and now criminal justice reform and the deregulation that Prof. Mulligan describes.
Prof. Mulligan points out that deregulation happened under Reagan and now even more under Trump. An implicit point is that other Republican presidents didn’t do much for deregulation.
Do you really think Trump is deregulating because of the intellectual force or political appeal of libertarian arguments? If you do, perhaps I could interest you in buying this attractive bridge over the East River.
And of course, whatever deregulation Trump effects will be reversed under the next Democratic administration, which Trump seems to be working over-time to hasten – perhaps so he can establish a cable network that, unlike Fox, will glorify him fulltime.
And to repeat, deregulation is not a specifically “libertarian” cause. You do not have to affirm the whole libertarian catechism to support it. It is enough merely to recognize that regulation has costs that, in many cases, will outweigh its benefits.
Libertarians claim policy “victories” for themselves when they tag along as (very) junior partners on causes primarily moved by vastly larger constituencies with motivations of their own, usually corporate interests or the Left.
In other contexts, people call this “Baptists and Bootleggers” – having very different motivations for desiring the same policy. “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Of the three major languages, I wonder if there is always an odd man out.
There is occasionally some analogous overlap between Social Conservatives and Progressives about sexual commercialization (pornography in the old Dworkin-MacKinnon sense, prostitution, etc.), the conservatives being against it for reasons of traditional morality, and the progressives framing it as inherently the systemic oppression of women by men where consent is either impossible or insufficient to cure the oppression, hence all the recent anti-‘trafficking’ efforts (see also the recent scandal about backpage – dot- com)
The odd man out in that case is the Libertarian framework and its Ulpian principle of volenti non fit iniuria.
Over time, one might expect potential areas of overlap to have the highest chance of action and aisle-crossing cooperation, and so they would tend to become more scarce over time, until there are only irreconcilable disputes remaining over all the major issues.
Re: “Over time, one might expect potential areas of overlap to have the highest chance of action and aisle-crossing cooperation, and so they would tend to become more scarce over time, until there are only irreconcilable disputes remaining over all the major issues.”
What you describe might be an empirically important upstream mechanism causing current polarization. Food for thought.
New technologies (social media), too, seem to have played a role.