Crime, Punishment, and Chesa Boudin

https://sbuss.substack.com/p/crime-punishment-and-chesa-boudin

by gwintrob • 5 years ago

39 17 5 years ago

sbuss.substack.com

aradox662• 5 years ago

There's some decent argumentation in here, but repeatedly referencing rising crime rates in San Francisco and other cities with anti-policing DAs is meaningless without context. Crime rates have been rising everywhere during the pandemic.

wahern2• 5 years ago

Not everywhere, but it is a fair point that San Francisco is hardly the only locality to see a significant increase in property crime. There are multiple cities in California in particular that have seen significant increases in property crimes, and after reading even a handful of police reports it's notable to me the number of repeat offenders who seem to travel among various cities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

There's definitely a dearth of hard data. But if you live in San Francisco, it's simply undeniable that the official numbers drastically underestimate the problem. This isn't merely an issue of media hype or mass hysteria. San Franciscans were already inured to car break-ins even when I first moved here ~20 years ago. Shopkeepers, especially downtown, have always dealt with significant amounts of larceny. Junkies and deranged homeless aren't exactly new, either. When we say crime and related issues like street aggression have substantially increased, it's because we see it with our very own eyes, not through stories or the media.

It doesn't much matter what's going on elsewhere, or whether you trust the police, to be able to oppose Boudin's policies. In fact, obsessing about what's going on elsewhere is part of the problem. Too many San Francisco politicians are crafting policies which address problems everywhere else but here. Even if Boudin's policies are only responsible for a fraction of the problem, they sure as heck aren't contributing to a solution. Like ring-wing ideologues in other parts of the country, many left-wing politicians here campaign on culture war issues that have almost no relevance for the city except in the most abstract terms. (Of course, there are substantial race and class issues here, but the contours and implications simply don't match those in most of the rest of the country.)

aradox662• 5 years ago

This argument is still baseless without a comparison between regions and policies. For all I know, crime rates are rising more slowly in San Francisco than any other city. If crime is rising in multiple cities, it can't be due to a policy in San Francisco alone.

It's fine to oppose his policies, but without a comparison, it's based on ideology, not evidence.

erehweb3• 5 years ago

From the article "Do we really need to have an argument about whether New Zealand [with a higher rate of incarceration than SF] is a carceralist state, or can we all just agree that this claim [that SF had been practicing mass incarceration] is absurd on its face?"

From the Guardian after a minute's Googling: "New Zealand has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world, with Māori people accounting for more than 50% of all prisoners, despite representing only 15% of the overall population. Some 90% of prisoners have a life-long diagnosis of mental illness or addiction." (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/29/yoga-herbs-and...)

Seems like there's an argument to be had, which makes me view the rest of the piece suspiciously.

[Edited to insert context on what "this claim" is]

creamytaco2• 5 years ago

What you wrote makes me view the Guardian take suspiciously rather than the OP and also fails to address in any way the argument since you -conveniently- ignore all but a tiny fraction that you found a Guardian opinion piece to seemingly not support.

An opinion piece that's also demonstrably false by the way, NZ does not have one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

erehweb3• 5 years ago

Looking at your chart, it has NZ at 188, UK at 114, FR 87, Germany 69, Canada 107. NZ looks higher on a skim than most (all) of Western Europe. What do you think I'm missing?

et2o• 5 years ago

New Zealand is lower than almost all other western countries and is about 1/10th of the US

erehweb3• 5 years ago

NZ is higher than most, if not all of Western Europe, and Canada, per https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...

wahern2• 5 years ago

Namely, housing first and harm reduction are policy failures that have led to an epidemic of homelessness and addiction in every jurisdiction that has embraced them. That’s why Portugal and the Netherlands abandoned these policies in favor of arrest and mandatory treatment.

Just to expand on this, many in the harm reduction camp like to point at Switzerland's harm reduction program, which is claimed to have been directly and immediately responsible for plummeting heroin addiction in the mid-90s. But I recently discovered this sobering analysis: Peter Reuter, Domenic Schnoz, "Assessing Drug Problems and Policies in Switzerland, 1998-2007", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237422443_Assessing... The TL;DR is that heroin usage had already began to plummet before the reforms were even enacted. This is based on the fact that advocates touted precipitous declines in addiction treatment numbers post legislative reform. But there's a multi-year lag between when people begin using heroin regularly and when their lives are destroyed and they find themselves in treatment, voluntarily or involuntarily. Combining the precipitous declines with the necessary lag period, that means the heroin epidemic had already begun to crumble years before the reforms. (Why it began to crumble isn't understood. We know so very little about how these epidemics unfold.)

Speaking of treatment, harm reduction advocates suggest that heroin was decriminalized. But that's a gross mischaracterization. During the 1990s in particular, Switzerland still aggressively arrested and punished people for drug-related crimes, including property crimes, and they enforced mandatory treatment for the worst addicts. There was (and remains) a program for legal heroin prescriptions, but they require mandatory out-patient addiction therapy, and so only a tiny minority (~5%) of addicts opt for legal heroin. Most addicts choose methadone treatment, incentivized by the fact that people are still arrested or otherwise face social opprobrium in the still illegal heroin market.

Drug reform in Switzerland has evolved considerably since the 1990s. In the 1990s Switzerland still aggressively arrested people for marijuana possession. Authorities are significantly more liberal today, but that tells us nothing about the cause+effect of the heroin epidemic 30 years ago. The average age of heroin addicts in Switzerland has crept up over the years as heroin simply stopped being the drug of choice, a process that began before reform efforts.

Harm reduction as a principal remains sound. Few people would defend a system of punishment for the sake of punishment, lacking any salutary effects. Of course our objective should be minimizing overall human suffering. But that principal alone simply does not (and judging by available evidence, cannot) justify removing all social restraints on criminal behavior and the drug markets with which they're associated in a particular time and place. Anti-drug laws can and have routinely been used discriminatorily, but the solution is to address the discrimination and abuse, refining the laws accordingly, not to abandon people to chaos, the consequences of which will naturally fall disproportionately on disadvantaged people nonetheless.

Anyone who thinks that our recent dramatic swing toward extreme leniency regarding opioid addiction and opioid-related crime isn't rooted in racism is fooling themselves. It's no coincidence that the white majority in the U.S. changed course when they began to fear the consequences of over criminalization. And because their fear was largely exaggerated (most advocates are not exactly in the risk group), we ended up with reforms which were more a salve for their own anxieties than actually effective at reducing societal harm or even simply harm to the addicted.

rashkov• 5 years ago

Most addicts choose methadone treatment, incentivized by the fact that people are still arrested or otherwise face social opprobrium in the still illegal heroin market.

Maybe they chose methadone because it’s supplied over the counter, and because it’s of a known pure quality, and it removes the users out of the black market and its criminality. Methadone is still an opiate, and the way it’s distributed is as close to opiate legalization as it gets.

eadmund• 5 years ago

Anyone who thinks that our recent dramatic swing toward extreme leniency regarding opioid addiction and opioid-related crime isn't rooted in racism is fooling themselves. It's no coincidence that the white majority in the U.S. changed course when they began to fear the consequences of over criminalization.

The phenomenon you describe (of folks ceasing support for a policy once they worry about being subject to it) is not racism; it's self-interest.

Neither is the prior phenomenon necessarily racist, although it might be. If folks had previously supported criminalisation as a means to the end of harming black folks, that would of course be racist, but if they supported it as a means to the end of increasing public safety without respect to the race of offenders, that would not be racist.

The rest of your post is excellent and well-reasoned.

shrubble• 5 years ago

FYI: Chesa Boudin is the adopted son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

They were involved in the Weather Underground (bomb-makers, not the weather website).

His birth mother and father went to jail when he was 14 months old (they were also WU).

spoonjim• 5 years ago

His birth parents are not as relevant as the fact that he’s always painted his birth parents as victims of the carceral state rather than as the terrorist murderers that they are. You can’t choose your parents but you can choose your attitude. He would have been a good SF Public Defender, but he’s a terrible DA.

hansthehorse• 5 years ago

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were his legal guardians not adoptive parents.

Kharvok• 5 years ago

He consistently makes apology for his terrorist birth parents. His actions as a DA encourage crime.

malermeister• 5 years ago

One, there must be something unrelated to criminal justice administration that (a) is only occurring in San Francisco, and (b) is so criminogenic that crime should actually be higher here, but our low incarceration rate is suppressing it. I honestly can’t think of what that would be, though.

I'll answer it for the author: Inequality. If you have a city littered with billionaires while a large chunk of the population can't even afford a safe place to sleep, chances are you'll see some property crime.

It's really not that hard to grasp. The whole article screams conservative outrage without any understanding of the matter at hand.

Crime, Punishment, and Chesa Boudin

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