The argument that you only have a 0.5–2% chance of being arrested is not really accurate. If you're not a gang member, don't have gang tattoos, or are not associated with gangs, then your probability of being arrested would be around 0.01% or less. The El Salvadoran Bryan Caplan would not have gang tattoos or be associated with the crimi…
The argument that you only have a 0.5–2% chance of being arrested is not really accurate. If you're not a gang member, don't have gang tattoos, or are not associated with gangs, then your probability of being arrested would be around 0.01% or less. The El Salvadoran Bryan Caplan would not have gang tattoos or be associated with the criminal underworld. For law-abiding people, this hardly, if at all, affects them negatively.
Your point regarding the slow creep of state power and corruption is a fair one, and in the long term, they should be moving towards stronger institutions that can carry out fair trials while maintaining harsh punishments.
I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.
The problem is the shifting goal post issue (not sure if that's the right term) to keep the program going / people employed once you meet your metric ala the current GLBT movement, feminism, etc, "we won but we need to pay our bills so rather then close shop, let's focus on new trivial issues".
Your criminal justice system is geared to a certain level of criminality, enforcement, etc, once they "win", doesn't just downsize and lay people off, they simply find, or invent, more criminals to keep all those supporting employees and facilities open. It's a giant rot you see in the US, and I'd daresay, many first world nations. Crime sells and gets votes, it's in no one's interest to win, hence we don't, but the publics but they are so ignorant and scarred on the matter that consistently vote against their own interests on this.
“I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.”
Only the life-long wealthy don't realise this. Ordinary people themselves are very well aware of how different criminals are to the rest of us. The policies of a truly democratic polity would look a lot more like those of Bukele's government than like those of the Biden regime.
Yep, thats a significant flaw in the argument, they’re not putting random people there, they’re putting people there who have an extrwmely likelyhood of being criminals/violent criminals. Besides, its obvious that not all the prisoners are gonna be there for life, this is a transitory situation designed to dissuade gangs from continuing their activities. Many of them will be freed if they show they can be useful members of society, eventually.
At some point in the near future the gang leaders will presumably realize that having easily identifiable tattoos to signal gang membership is no longer a viable option and figure out some other, less visible way to set apart members (like maybe gang colors that it is possible to change out of if you are running from the cops). At that point, the risk of innocents being arrested will presumably go up. Bukele got "lucky" in that the gangs chose such an obvious and legible way to mark their members (presumably previous law enforcement regimes were so weak that gangsters could get away with having visible tattoos).
The point of the tattoos is that everyone can see them and they are hard to remove. This ensures that the members can’t abandon their loyalty to the gang having made such a credible signal. Any attempt to achieve a similar objective would need similar criteria.
It's not just about the tattoos. If you're a gangmember, even if you don't have tattoos, there's gonna be a lot of really obvious signs you're a member, whether it's by your friends, family, and associates, or by a profile of your personal and economic activity, and also your demographic information, such as sex, age, and even race. The same is true of Islamists, for whom getting tattoos is frowned upon, but whom nonetheless are easy enough to identify by similar profiling measures.
There's always tradeoffs. Making it harder to convict criminals makes it harder to both punish the innocent --and-- the guilty. But the more damage the guilty cause, the less concern there'll be from the general populous about anything other than how a stop can be put to the guilty. Indeed, all of Latinoamerica is an indictment of the idea that leniency towards criminality is anything but a state-sanctioned subsidy towards criminality. Outside of Cuba (which doesn't really deserve credit, ob account of being a state that's --run-- by criminals as opposed to being a state with a serious crime problem, but which even in their case has benefitted from actually having some teeth to their criminal punishment), the laws in most of the region have been a joke for a long time: no death penalty, no life sentences, and comically short terms even in the event you can get a conviction.
The BLM-ification of criminal justice has also done equal damage to the US. Felonious crime has skyrocketed in tandem with the success of the movement, because its advocates are relentlessly pro-crime, which itself has been an endemic problem of civil-rights movements since well before the 21st Century. Thoughtful people should have no patience for such bullshittery as this.
This is true, but this is where the veil of ignorance comes in. These gang members may be awful people, but in the utilitarian calculus (and in the language of human rights) their welfare is no less important than anyone else's. So to judge whether the society is fair you must put to one side the question of "would *I* be sent to jail without trial?"; it makes no difference whether it's happening to you or to someone else.
The argument that you only have a 0.5–2% chance of being arrested is not really accurate. If you're not a gang member, don't have gang tattoos, or are not associated with gangs, then your probability of being arrested would be around 0.01% or less. The El Salvadoran Bryan Caplan would not have gang tattoos or be associated with the criminal underworld. For law-abiding people, this hardly, if at all, affects them negatively.
Your point regarding the slow creep of state power and corruption is a fair one, and in the long term, they should be moving towards stronger institutions that can carry out fair trials while maintaining harsh punishments.
I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.
The problem is the shifting goal post issue (not sure if that's the right term) to keep the program going / people employed once you meet your metric ala the current GLBT movement, feminism, etc, "we won but we need to pay our bills so rather then close shop, let's focus on new trivial issues".
Your criminal justice system is geared to a certain level of criminality, enforcement, etc, once they "win", doesn't just downsize and lay people off, they simply find, or invent, more criminals to keep all those supporting employees and facilities open. It's a giant rot you see in the US, and I'd daresay, many first world nations. Crime sells and gets votes, it's in no one's interest to win, hence we don't, but the publics but they are so ignorant and scarred on the matter that consistently vote against their own interests on this.
“I think people underestimate just how different the criminal underclass is to ordinary people and what a menace they are to society if not properly controlled.”
Only the life-long wealthy don't realise this. Ordinary people themselves are very well aware of how different criminals are to the rest of us. The policies of a truly democratic polity would look a lot more like those of Bukele's government than like those of the Biden regime.
Yep, thats a significant flaw in the argument, they’re not putting random people there, they’re putting people there who have an extrwmely likelyhood of being criminals/violent criminals. Besides, its obvious that not all the prisoners are gonna be there for life, this is a transitory situation designed to dissuade gangs from continuing their activities. Many of them will be freed if they show they can be useful members of society, eventually.
At some point in the near future the gang leaders will presumably realize that having easily identifiable tattoos to signal gang membership is no longer a viable option and figure out some other, less visible way to set apart members (like maybe gang colors that it is possible to change out of if you are running from the cops). At that point, the risk of innocents being arrested will presumably go up. Bukele got "lucky" in that the gangs chose such an obvious and legible way to mark their members (presumably previous law enforcement regimes were so weak that gangsters could get away with having visible tattoos).
The point of the tattoos is that everyone can see them and they are hard to remove. This ensures that the members can’t abandon their loyalty to the gang having made such a credible signal. Any attempt to achieve a similar objective would need similar criteria.
It's not just about the tattoos. If you're a gangmember, even if you don't have tattoos, there's gonna be a lot of really obvious signs you're a member, whether it's by your friends, family, and associates, or by a profile of your personal and economic activity, and also your demographic information, such as sex, age, and even race. The same is true of Islamists, for whom getting tattoos is frowned upon, but whom nonetheless are easy enough to identify by similar profiling measures.
There's always tradeoffs. Making it harder to convict criminals makes it harder to both punish the innocent --and-- the guilty. But the more damage the guilty cause, the less concern there'll be from the general populous about anything other than how a stop can be put to the guilty. Indeed, all of Latinoamerica is an indictment of the idea that leniency towards criminality is anything but a state-sanctioned subsidy towards criminality. Outside of Cuba (which doesn't really deserve credit, ob account of being a state that's --run-- by criminals as opposed to being a state with a serious crime problem, but which even in their case has benefitted from actually having some teeth to their criminal punishment), the laws in most of the region have been a joke for a long time: no death penalty, no life sentences, and comically short terms even in the event you can get a conviction.
The BLM-ification of criminal justice has also done equal damage to the US. Felonious crime has skyrocketed in tandem with the success of the movement, because its advocates are relentlessly pro-crime, which itself has been an endemic problem of civil-rights movements since well before the 21st Century. Thoughtful people should have no patience for such bullshittery as this.
This is true, but this is where the veil of ignorance comes in. These gang members may be awful people, but in the utilitarian calculus (and in the language of human rights) their welfare is no less important than anyone else's. So to judge whether the society is fair you must put to one side the question of "would *I* be sent to jail without trial?"; it makes no difference whether it's happening to you or to someone else.