this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
1671 points (98.9% liked)
Microblog Memes
6436 readers
3872 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.
Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it's been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that's obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.
We looked at three strike's laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.
It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.
The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.
We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.
Maybe they catch some guy who's a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they're doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they'll say, oh sure, that's because we have a "catch and release" system.
Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we're kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.
And while we're on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.
But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we're spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they'd start cutting the programs.
And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it's ever been in my lifetime.
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it's completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It's already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what's unclear. People saying "nobody will work" are definitely wrong, though, lol.
I think you could address that by using what I call "Universal Ranked Income". The idea is that there are floors and ceilings on income, wealth, and so forth. The floor is basically a minimum wage, while the ceiling of the highest income bracket is absolute - people simply do not get any more income at that level, regardless of their job or investments.
In addition to this, job classes should be assigned a rank based on the effort, risk, and knowledge required to perform the task. The job class has a fixed income, that employers can't alter. They cannot manipulate the number of workdays, the income of a job is fixed, with each month delivering a set wage. Workhours and days are also fixed, to prevent employer manipulation.
Next, is a small pool of income archetypes, from lowest to highest. By keeping the diversity in job ranks to a dozen at most, employees can say "My boss isn't supposed to get that much money, they are only X. Something smells!". By creating a framework of obvious rules, it would be easier for society to nip potential oligarchs in the bud.
Here are some ranks from my notes as a baseline sample:
Rank 0: $10,000 per year, 05% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$1,500. Has no work obligations.
Rank 1: $10,000-20,000 per year, 10% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in up to -$4,000. For students, who receive a level of income based on grades.
Rank 2: $40,000 per year, 15% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$10,000. Waiters, clerks, curbside hawkers, daycare staff.
Rank 3: $60,000 per year, 20% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$18,000. Crop pickers, athletes, sex workers, couriers, nurses, police, teachers, journalists, soldiers in cold zones.
Rank 4: $80,000 per year, 25% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$28,000. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, researchers, hot zone troops.
Rank 5: $100,000 per year, 30% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$40,000. Astronauts, Firemen, ambulance staff, hot battlefield leaders, surgeons, diplomats, lumberjacks, lead researchers.
If you look at the example, notice that education has become a job. It delivers a variable income based on performance, but is still less valuable than being a waiter, who has a fixed $40k income. Education is a pathway to a career, and people can focus on the path, since education offers an income for being studious. The current method of education sucks, because a person has to balance their survival, wellbeing, and education against each other. This is extremely inefficient and punishes people.
Further, I think the URI can potentially negate inflation. This is because the value of money has to be judged against the fixed incomes of society. Remember, jobs lost value, largely because employers keep the fruits of productivity to themselves. By enforcing fixed incomes for everyone and placing heavy restrictions on organizations, we can mitigate that siphoning of wealth. Price controls are much easier when you don't have a huge variety of income factors to confuse the calculation.