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To address this problem, we need to fundamentally revisit the idea of the social contract. Even the definition of crime today feels outdated almost archaic. If you look into your country’s penal code, you’ll likely find absurd and antiquated laws that have no place in a modern society.
The deeper issue is this: most legal systems are still grounded in Victorian moralism, Puritan ideals that glorify work and wealth, and a liberal ethical framework that collapses under its own contradictions. Trying to solve complex structural violence with these tools just makes things worse.
The problem isn’t just systemic it’s internal. As long as we defend our comfort zones like fragile sandcastles, thinking “as long as I’m safe and untouched” (aka “I’ve got mine, so screw the rest”), then we will continue to see public resources diverted—not toward justice or equality—but recycled back at us as institutional violence.
F.e. the current Dutch penal code was accept in 1881. Thats 144 years ago.
Part of the issue is that we are mostly stuck in an economic structure that cannot continue forever unless everybody partakes. Getting more wages every year, getting more revenue and profit every year, just doesn’t work for eternity. In theory, if everybody got their 2%$ wage increases and interest was just 2% a year (excluding promotions or corrections for pas years etc) it would be fine.
The circular economy theory is one of those theories that attempts to fix that AND also work on helping the repair, reuse, recycle movement.
Can we be real? Police do not reduce crime.
Police punish criminals, or rather, they punish those that they think are criminals, since everyone is innocent until proven guilty (also the reason you shouldn’t argue, fight with, nor run from cops… They can charge you with crimes like evading arrest, even if the arrest is unlawful, resisting arrest, or assault on a “peace officer”… Justice does not come from police action, it comes from the actions of the court)…
Police usually show up, and/or take action after crimes have been committed, not before.
If you want effective crime prevention, there are plenty of good studies that prove what works, and putting more police on the streets, and giving them better and better arsenals is not on that list.
From social programs to “handouts” for healthcare and basics like food and shelter, among so many more proven tactics, can significantly reduce crime rates.
Giving the police money under the guise of reducing crime or being tough on crime is just political spin. What they’re trying to do is funnel public dollars to their friends who make the equipment that the police use. Vests, weapons, radios, vehicles, you name it. More police means that police departments need more equipment to supply everyone.
These fuckers in government are serving themselves and their fat cat friends, not the public interest. The worst part is, that many believe their shit and think that it’s for the public good to give the police more money.
That’s the real problem here, ignorance. But again, that’s what the fat cats want. The majority to be just stupid enough to believe whatever they’re told and do no further investigation… To have faith in liars, thieves and cheats.
In a normal state of things the police doesn’t decide who is a criminal, the justice system does and that should be separated from the government. Sadly there are more and more corrupt countries these days. But yeah giving them more money for anything else than to get more/better personel doesn’t help.
That’s all great. But imagine being in the desert and knowing where an oasis is but just not telling any one about it. We all know this information on the left. We repeat it like crows cawing to each other. But we don’t pass it a long. So unless we get better at sharing our views in a modern online world, all this information is not worth jack fucking shit. And sharing this information is not just reciting it verbatim in a comment in a forum among everyone that already knows this. Unless that’s what we’re really after. Pats on the back from people who agree with us.
But imagine being in the desert and knowing where an oasis is but just not telling any one about it
We could do that, but it’s entirely irrelevant to the discussion
But we don’t pass it a long.
Maybe you dont
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The circle jerk is definitely real, and I acknowledge it. At the same time though, to go along with your comment, we need to develop ways to actually bridge the gap. A lot, and in my experience most, of right leaning ignorant types are so hard set in their bullshit they won’t listen. Deep set propaganda channels on the right are so engrained they refuse to take any information outside of it. Granted I understand my area is a bit worse as I’m deep in a red state, but it’s disheartening as fuck. Not trying to be absolutist, I get there’s always a way, just fuck if I know what it is.
In my experience, it all comes down to presentation. Most die-hard Trump supporters aren’t as locked into their beliefs as people assume. But when we approach them waving the typical “leftist” flag, their defenses immediately go up.
I’ve had plenty of honest conversations where, if you avoid the usual framing, many of them actually agree with progressive policies. But you can’t come at them swinging it shuts everything down.
They’re not dumb, racist caricatures they’re people, just like anyone else. One of the right’s biggest strengths is building a shield that prevents our ideas from even reaching them. We need to ask: Why is so much effort spent on keeping our perspectives from mixing?
There is a lot of money and effort among the right wing party to antagonize the left to become more aggressive and hateful of the right. And we fall for it constantly. We’re trained to meet them with hostility, and that aggression plays right into the system’s hands. It doesn’t have to be that way. We should be discussing to understand their point of view and finding solutions for how the information we know can be used to open them up more to ours.
As an outside observer it seems like American police culture is fundamentally rotten and it’s not a funding issue.
What’s cool is they are exporting it. The cops where you are look up to the American style. When the American cops retire, they will be hired to train your cops with seminars and books. Its a fun little community. So you’re an outsider, but not for long. Just a few more years of passively waiting and you will be an insider soon.
If I recall the vast majority of crime is property crime and if you remove property concerns that crime drops.
Pay attention to what we do whenever you see policy announcements as that gives a clear picture of what we want.
If you think you’re altruistic ass (not necessarily yours specifically) is different, you’re still a part of the machine that wants this. If you’re legit disgusted by it work from within to change it.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” is contrived as shit but it’s true.
I’m literally being as belligerent as I can already!
Don’t be belligerent you attract more bears with honey.
We’ve known for years that starting school at 08.00 is detrimental to school-aged children and teenagers, but we keep doing it.
We’ve known for years that WFH can be just as productive and even more so than RTO, but we keep doing it.
We’ve known for ages that housing homeless people helps them and society much better than criminalizing them, but we keep doing it.
We’ve known for ages that repressive stances on drugs are counterproductive, but we keep doing it.
We’ve known for ages that a 4-day workweek results in gains for everyone, including the owner class themselves, yet we keep on doing 5.
I’m starting to think that gaining knowledge and insight is completely useless if the results are never taken into account if they don’t fit the currently reigning narrative.
Humans are a deeply flawed species. That alone is bad enough, but we KNOW we are, we KNOW how to solve at least some of it, yet we simply refuse.
All those points are always resisted by Conservatives / Regressives… They are fucking wrong about every solution to every problem we face since the dawn of time.
Because by their nature and beliefs, they are resistant to change, any change, even good ones.
Not true. They are in favor of change that benefits the wealthy. They resist any change the benefits the general public.
They’re not for just any change that benefits the wealthy: they’re against any mutually beneficial change.
Some might even say that’s the way things have always been, so they refuse to change it…
What do conservatives want? Money and control. If they willingly choose to have less of one, it’s in pursuit of the other.
They are resisted because they threaten the status quo of the oligarchs and the useful idiots they are able to convince. In my country, they mostly do it by doing barbecues, concerts during the campaign, giving people in the countryside buckets, umbrellas a bag of rice and bottle of oil, and lots of TV and TikTok propaganda. In the US, religion seems to plays a much bigger role.
We’ve known for years that starting school at 08.00 is detrimental to school-aged children and teenagers, but we keep doing it.
But work is
9-59-6, can’t have flexible hours. Everyone knows a busy employee is less likely to get weird ideas like unionizing.We’ve known for years that WFH can be just as productive and even more so than RTO, but we keep doing it.
But you can’t control and micromanage the
slaveemployee if they aren’t physically present at work. And also, we need to keep the employee busy on the 1-2hr commute, see above point.We’ve known for ages that housing homeless people helps them and society much better than criminalizing them, but we keep doing it.
You mean the poor landlords lose the bread from their mouth and not get paid rent?
We’ve known for ages that repressive stances on drugs are counterproductive, but we keep doing it.
Stealing the bread of our poor military complex and police forces? Can’t have that.
We’ve known for ages that a 4-day workweek results in gains for everyone, including the owner class themselves, yet we keep on doing 5.
See point #1
My point is that it’s literally a class war between the oligarchs in power and the rest of us.
Have you considered that those things aren’t done not because of stupidity but because a small subset of society that holds most of the political power and media benefits from those things being done?
The system isn’t flawed in the sense that it doesn’t work. It does. Extremely well. It just doesn’t work for you and me or to make everyone’s lives better.
Yeah imagine bees saying we KNOW smoking us and removing our honey leads to disorder and pointless work, so why do we keep doing it?
A little glib I admit, but I agree. There are a minority of people holding us back, and not enough political capital, or incentive, to make the necessary changes.
I don’t know if that analogy fully works. Bees get safety, they get a maintained home, as a colony they get healthcare from pests and similar, they get security when things get rough
Yes, they do more work, but the beekeeper also cares for them, and ensures their survival to a greater degree
Not to mention, they’re not caged, they’re free to leave
Yeah, if bees are stressed by their hive location, they move. Bees will just leave honey farms if they have some sort of detrimental effect that out weights the benefits of the hive location.
We’ve known for years that starting school at 08.00 is detrimental to school-aged children and teenagers, but we keep doing it.
Yeah, but we also know school is more about free childcare that allows both parents to go to work than it is about actual education.
We’ve known for years that WFH can be just as productive and even more so than RTO, but we keep doing it.
We also know that a large part of the real estate market is dependent on leasing office space.
We’ve known for ages that housing homeless people helps them and society much better than criminalizing them, but we keep doing it
Again, creating more homes drives down property value.
We’ve known for ages that repressive stances on drugs are counterproductive, but we keep doing it.
It also creates jobs for police officers, income for private prisons, and strips minorities of their rights.
We’ve known for ages that a 4-day workweek results in gains for everyone, including the owner class themselves, yet we keep on doing 5.
This is once again an issue with the real estate market. Cutting the work week also cuts into profits of companies dependent on demand made from people commuting to and from work.
starting to think that gaining knowledge and insight is completely useless if the results are never taken into account if they don’t fit the currently reigning narrative.
It’s not that we don’t take account of the results, it’s just that the results do not benefit the nonsensical economic system we’ve adapted to. Our system does not create value from the things we have, it creates value from the things we withold.
Wow, I’m starting to think that maybe real estate shouldn’t be a commodity subjected to market forces.
Be prepared to be assassinated by a jr level manager from Black Rock. Keep your head on a swivel. Bryce played lacrosse for Princeton, he don’t miss son.
fair, but then how would houses be sold and bought?
they shouldn’t.
then how would people move?
Taking a page from the Singapore HDB, housing can be sold/bought by the state, and prices are set by what the applicant can afford, rather than what the market is willing to pay. This allows residents to move to different locations, or change dwelling size to fit their currents needs (marriage, children, empty nesters, divorce, etc.).
I imagine this can work in a multi-city state, too… just need to make sure there is ample supply to allow for migrations without waiting lists.
Unlike rent control on rentals from a private market, price control for a majority public housing system can work, as a black market is hard to establish.
curious about how the value is calculated when selling if it is based on the applicant not the state/location of the property?
Our system does not create value from the things we have, it creates value from the things we withold.
Getting this stitched onto a throw pillow and plastered all over those “In This House We Believe” placards.
Ahh yes, another untapped market! Inspirational chachkies for billionaires.
It’s right up there with my "Lie. Cheat. Steal. " “Live. Laugh. Love.” painting.
We’ve known for ages that paying for social services, healthcare and unemployment benefits increase the amount of spendable income the working class has and that this directly benefits the real economy while more income to top earners only means that that money is lost to the economy.
Most of the problems the US is facing could be fixed, or at least alleviated with social democratic programs. Better economy, better education, less crime, less partisanship, less drug abuse, less violence, less stress, less fear, better mental health, better physical health, less homelessness, more gender equality, more racial equality, more job security, better wages, better lifestyle, more happiness, less religion, etc. etc.
You have to cycle out old fucks to get progress.
After my generation dies you might be able to move forward in some of those fronts.
I will say, about the school times, that the biggest issue is the parent schedules, not the kids. Shifting times makes it much harder on parents, unless you also push tradwife-ish values: one parent must give up their career to care for the kids. It’s a sticky topic without an easy solution.
Edit the responses about the school times illustrate my point. I’m not saying there’s no solution; I’m saying there’s no easy solution that isn’t contentious.
After my generation dies you might be able to move forward in some of those fronts.
Before this most recent US election, I had the same thought that the old fossils in power are the reasons nothing is getting better.
Yeah white men from Gen Z have shown the cycle will continue ad infinitum. It’s more about maintaining the racial hierarchy and patriarchy than age.
I think old fossils had a huge impact on the outcome of the election, with a lot of backing by rich individuals and business interests that are unrelated to wealth.
Kamala was relatively young, but look at the rest of Congress and the leadership at the state level. The average age of all state leadership, including governors, and Senate & House speakers, is 58. The average age of all state governors alone is 68.
outside of Elementary (kindergarden mostly) schools and suburbia there isn’t really a reason parents are needed for children to catch a bus/ walk a few miles to school.
You’re describing, like, 50% of the population of children in US. But ignoring that, there are other, valid reasons people don’t want to go off to work and leave their kids to catch a bus in a couple of hours. Even with buses, it’s not uncommon to see parents standing with their kids at the bus stop. In Minnesota in the winter, where it can sometimes reach -45°C in the winter, you don’t let your kid walk 4 blocks to stand for 20 minutes waiting for a bus that might be 20 minutes late because of snow. Frostbite of a very real risk in a lot of the world.
You’re thinking very locally.
I’ve gone to a bus stop in -40° weather before (northern Alaska), frostbite isn’t that much of a concern if you have good enough clothing (children should not be sent out in fabrics that lose all insulating properties when wet spend the extra if they are going out in even -20°C regularly) handwarmers do exist for gloves if the child has learned how not to burn themselves (and when burns are preferable to freezing) and they get their gloves wet.
it would be nice if school buses had trackers so kids could know how delayed they currently are (or if the route is canceled because the bus drove off the road again).
I used to believe the first line in your comment but the new generation is swinging further right than their parents (mostly male). So now I’m not so sure
You might be right; I don’t interact with a lot of Z. If so, maybe it’s a good thing we’re on the path to an ecological catastrophe and another, this time man-made, global extinction event.
I mean I don’t either and probably if I didn’t I wouldn’t have the same findings, but that’s what the statistics say for the western world at least
Science advances one funeral at a time -Max Plank
What he was saying is that we can discover all the new things we want, but the people who have respected and established careers who don’t believe the new science tend to block/slow down it’s acceptance and further application until they die, then science advances…
I think that’s all of society, not just science though…
I will say, about the school times, that the biggest issue is the parent schedules, not the kids.
I call bullshit on this. Most school districts have high-schoolers starting at 7:30, middle-shoolers at 8, and elementary at 8:30, or something like that.
Yet, elementary aged kids are naturally up by 6 (if the parents are lucky; often earlier), and are also the biggest contingent that gets driven (instead of bussed) to school. A working parent can drive to their kid’s school and be on time for work without much issue early in the day, not so much at rush hour. And they are be up with their kids bright and early anyhow.
High-schoolers are the ones that need the most night sleep of the bunch, and with the latest sleep cycle. They are also the most independent. It’s not an issue to leave a high-schooler at home and go to work while they bus/drive/bike themselves to school later.
In short, both parents and kids schedules benefit from a reversal of the timetables, but we don’t do it for $REASONS.
When one of us works from home, we can do both. We’re productive enough from home that the extra time missed while walking them to school or waiting at the bus stop with them is more than made up for, especially when we save commute time and money.
That’s great for white collar workers. It’s a bit of an entitled perspective, though; there are many people in the US who aren’t privileged enough to be able to do their jobs through Zoom.
There’s an easy solution: Push workdays later into the day so a 9-5 becomes an 11-7.
Push workdays later into the day so a 9-5 becomes an 11-5.
FTFY
work can get fucked if they think I’m giving up my evenings. We should be pushing for shorter workdays, too. Not just push them back.
I’ll do 4 days a week from 9-2, how about that?
11-7
when do i get to have fun?
2 Weeks every year. No, you don’t always get to choose which ones. Yes, they are also your sick days.
You can either adjust your sleep patterns to get the same amount of evening fun time, have fun in the morning, or organize and force the bourgeoisie to give you shorter workdays.
You have the understand that your culture is not predicated on logic, reason, or the scientific method. Its designed to feed the capitalist machine and perpetually increase productivity. That’s the only real outcome measure.
Starting school late will make it difficult for parents to get their kids to the bus stop / school on their way to work. We can’t disrupt the productivity of the parents - that’s the priority.
WFH decreases the control your employer has over you and also diminishes the value of their real estate. Will someone please think of the capitalists?
Housing homeless people is socialist. We musn’t disincentivize productive behavior!
Drugs and all “crime” must be allowed to happen and then stamped out by force. Only then can we use fear to control populations and define an outgroup that becomes our baseline for dehumanization.
All of this is by design in Western and many other modern cultures. It was never really a question of knowing better.
We start school at 9 since its bad for kids to start it early.
WFH is pretty common here
We treat drugs as disease and doing or owning them isnt illegal
Homeless do get shelter here
4 day workweek is being trialled constantly and only lost since some cunts take advantage of it and ruin it for everyone.
There are changes happening worldwide. The bigger the country, the more stagnant it is.
Best I can do is school at 7:30 and sometimes 6:50.
yet we keep on doing 5
6 day workweeks are pretty common in my country now. almost as if breaking our spirits takes precedence over productivity in capitalism.
Greece? :-/
no way greece also has a 6 day workweek 😔
workers of the world are due for some uniting.
It’s not that we refuse, we just can’t help but put stupid arrogant people in charge of everything. They don’t listen to science, just themselves, so nothing changes.
As a species, we’ve basically been doing this forever. Or at least since Machiavelli wrote the Prince, which is literally what’s happening everywhere now.
Simply put, those with intelligence know enough to realize what they don’t know. So they won’t make claims they can’t pursue. Politically, this will always work against them, and in favor of any loud idiot that promises everything, but can’t deliver. People will always pick the loud idiot, because the loud idiot will promise more than the intelligent option could ever reasonably accomplish.
The secret to solving this is simply transparency, and regulation.
That is: don’t let stupid leaders be stupid behind closed doors. Bring it into the open for scrutiny by professionals. Don’t let stupid people hold positions of authority by placing requirements for those positions to be held. Military service, or public service requirements work, but so do simple tests that could prevent hostile idiots from holding positions of power they will guarantee abuse.
There’s more solutions provided in the Prince as well. So this problem certainly isn’t a new one.
To be fair on point 1, schools are staggered with start times so there isn’t a million buses on the road at once.
- protestant work ethic
- religious bullshit
- backwards thinking
- politicians respond to the people’s demands
- stupid laws result
- dumb people shouldn’t be able to participate in society
We need to create a new state of enlightenment, the technocracy state.
people who upvote the parent comment but downvote “technocracy” don’t understand what technocracy means
It’s almost like their highest priority isn’t lowering crime.
Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.
Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?
A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people’s lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.
With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as “adtech”, people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person’s current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.
If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today’s market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It’s no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.
The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people’s lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people’s privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn’t be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren’t violent or who aren’t a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.
I’m not disagreeing with this necessarily, but I don’t like seeing a post by an account I have no idea about stating something as scientific fact, and then having that post taken as fact point blank. Once again, not trying to say what she is saying is incorrect, I just get concerned when I see bandwagoning on some random person’s take.
That said, if you find the studies on this, please please please do us all a favor and comment those!
Here’s a decent meta-analysis you can start with.
Sixteen reviews met the inclusion criteria. The reviews were comprised of nine peer-reviewed articles and reports from systematic review databases, five technical reports, and two working papers. Table 1 shows the reviews organized by objectives and geography
Well done and thank you.
Awesome, love this.
I wish this was the post or at least linked.
I’m disappointed that your link was not a rickcroll.
There is a mountain of evidence and everything she says is common knowledge at this point to anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking it up. You can just use you favorite search engine to see for yourself.
You really just come off sounding aloof and uninformed. What evidence!? When you are swimming in a sea surrounded by it.
Sorry I was too busy yelling at other people on other threads.
But also my concern was about the reaction to the post, not necessarily the post itself, though the two are connected
Fair enough, I can see your concern.
Spoiler: they don’t actually want crime to go down
They want to punish the people they don’t like, not reduce crime.
They don’t even really care about punishment, I’d say the real driver for the prison system is just the need for labor and the loophole of enslavement. Most of the plantations that were major holders of slaves are now prisons after all.
I hate the prison industrial complex as much as the next guy, but, you gotta sauce on plantations to prisons?
Lmao, my bad on not getting back to you, but the other feller’s link is pretty much a good summary. Adding a few though because that article doesn’t list which ones have undergone the evolution, lol.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/01/prison-plantations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm
https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-plantation/
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-plantations/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/5-ways-prisoners-were-used-for-profit-throughout-u-s-history
Our government loves to use what it has in terms of resources for as close to free as it can manage. From a purely Machiavellian and pragmatic perspective, it’s sensible, even if it’s utterly reprehensible.
Okay, yeah, I knew about that. State pen where I grew up was a farm. The majority of plantations didn’t become prisons, it doesn’t take that many people to farm anymore. Modern farming is often a high skill job driving heavy equipment.
A few plantations became prisons, but the majority didn’t. Slavery is totally okay, by the constitution, for prisoners. Too bad they didn’t put in anything about rehabilitation.
When I said “major holders” I meant some of the Largest plantations were converted, rather than a majority of All plantations, sorry for not being clearer. I would agree that they genuinely don’t need as much labor due to ag-science development. However, I was also trying to convey what this map https://pudding.cool/2017/01/shape-of-slavery/ shows in words. The main theme of “which plantations” got converted mostly has to do with soil quality due to the Mississippi River delta over eons than it does with race or useful and efficient placement of reform facilities. Sorry for not thinking to go find the map yesterday, lol. (Also upon review this isn’t even the map I thought it was, though pertinent and I may add more, lol.)
Prisoners are legally allowed to be enslaved. Which is not great, even though I understand the motive. It’s been pretty well proven that punitive incarceration is bad for the individual and society. Remove punishment from the equation and slavery is not justifiable.
Most plantations continued to be farmland, some plantation houses still exist but wood maintenance in the south is a lot. Some of the old plantations overlap with prison farms. Most of the farm system has been shutdown as it isn’t economical.
Anyhow, yeah. The US has a huge incarcerated population, mostly black/Hispanic minorities, they are used for profit by enslavement.
They want people to associate African Americans with drugs, Latin Americans and Hispanics with rapes, transpeople with pedophilia, and Leftists with disorderly conduct in order to have excuses to arrest these people.
It’s why they take an “Aww shucks” attitude everytime a Right Winger shoots up a Kindergarten, they don’t want that connection being made
California had a great mental health system in place. Ronald Reagan got elected and chose to close many of the in patient facilities. This lead to mass homelessness, which meant the police and prison budgets had to go up.
Then he did the same thing when he was President.
California had a great mental health system in place.
I’m sorry, but no, we really fucking didn’t. Reagan was wrong (about everything) to close them, but they weren’t good before he did that by a looooong shot
Their excuse was rampant abuse, so instead of fixing it, they just closed them.
Small government doin its thing, yay Murica. Also stricter gun laws thanks to good old fashioned racism and hospitals are more overworked than ever with patients dealing with substance abuse and other related mental health issues. We stopped putting sick people in treatment and the cops just started shooting them instead.
And their dogs…
Edit: spelling, I got to stop drunk commenting
What if locking people up indefinitely (as many were in institutions decades ago) and diagnosing them with subjective criteria isn’t ideal? I’m not dismissing anybody’s diagnosis or hand-waving real symptoms or illness - I’m merely suggesting that an authoritarian system where human rights are stripped with minimal outside observation (with sometimes flimsy criteria and fallible actors) is potentially damaging to mental health and is probably not conducive to healing. It can be a very imbalanced power dynamic, especially as it was in the institutions of the past as you pointed out.
We need an answer to retain the rights of those involuntarily held as best as possible. I think it’s important to make courts more accessible to patients (and their loved ones), providing those held involuntarily with access to second opinions or different facilities (in some cases), and having established (and independently enforced) criteria for release - with appeals available for patients to argue their case for release with legal representation and other expert witnesses (e.g. other psychiatrists, qualified individuals directly involved in their care past or present) and perhaps even family members and other people who were involved with the patient.
Involuntary commitment (for any extended period) should be reserved for the severely mentally ill, who are determined by independent review to be in need of treatment to stabilize - and only those who are a danger to themselves or others, those who committed crimes, and those who are actively violent should be held in higher-security (locked) facilities.
I feel the rest would benefit greatly from conditions akin to a Soteria House (without locked doors, forced medication, or coercion) - the Soteria House model could be expanded, adapted, or modified. Treatment could be loosely mandated by courts, with reviews conducted and alternative treatment plans established if the patient wishes to modify or discontinue treatment before they are thought to be stabilized by their psychiatrist(s) and care team. I feel that maintaining consent, valuing patient input in forming treatment plans, and avoiding coercion is key to address certain states of trauma - otherwise patients are potentially faced with more trauma.
For those who are not thought to be severely ill, but who are thought to be in temporary crisis (and who are not thought to be violent or a threat to themselves or others), stabilization could be attempted in a temporary hold to assess their state, and continued onward with care akin to Soteria Houses or intensive outpatient care and other forms of observation and forms of support (e.g. with their environment and other distressing situations they are facing).
And to respond directly to you, I definitely feel like society was incapable or very underequipped to fix the institutions back then. Society is still largely unable to address distress and its very real manifestations or consequences - such as homelessness and the prevention of individuals from becoming homeless against their will.
The reason they locked people up is that they didn’t have any other treatment. Most psychiatric meds are recent inventions.
Here’s a link to a longer piece on the whole situation.
And a great deal of the rights violations persist to this day, regardless of some of the treatments being viable presently to stabilize individuals.
Lifelong prescriptions are misappropriated and are too common (see Soteria Houses - they use psychiatric drugs in first-episode psychosis/schizophrenia with consent for stabilization and only for a few months to achieve remission in some individuals), people are kidnapped (sometimes in the middle of the night) and taken without due process by individuals who aren’t able to assess mental illness, medicalized rape or forced psychiatry is rampant (patient choice is disregarded), there is essentially zero outside oversight, court access is wholly insufficient, you generally can’t get second opinions, forced treatment orders still exist (so even when you’re released you have to get court-ordered intramuscular shots), and so forth.
Some medications like neuroleptics carry a pretty big risk (20%~) of causing a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia, which can be permanent and extremely debilitating. Polypharmacy is rampant and unregulated (some people can be on a pretty extreme cocktail of drugs).
There’s still atrocities and those who fall through the cracks in the system, but there are success stories presently, which is contrasted by the horrors even in the 80’s (which was fairly tame compared to psychiatry in the decades that came before it).
Psychiatry is in need of reform, and it doesn’t seem like psychiatrists or the for-profit hospitals behind them are interested in enacting that serious reform.
The downside to this approach, when you get right down to it, even if it works and improves standards of living all round. The real crux of the problem that the scientists always ignore is this: you’d have to allow some of your money to go to other people. That’s a deal breaker for most folks with money.
It’s worse than that. Some folks actually reject the idea that those poorer than them should have nice things, or even OK things. This is why there are voucher programs, why so much social housing (when it was built) are ugly, plain boxes showcasing the worst of brutalism.
I feel like most rich people would reject 1000$ if that meant a poor person got 500$.
During covid, they took $100ks while people got $500,
everybody knows how deverstating low crime and high purchasing power are for business
Western capitalist neoliberal dogma, which has largely been adopted globally, has us working against each other rather than towards a common good. That dogma dictates that we should see poverty as laziness and entitlement and wealth as aspirational and fulfilling.
It’s easy to blame capitalism for this and I don’t disagree it’s pretty broken right now but I’ve been all over the world and people are largely like this. In India I heard a lot of “rich people deserve it because they have good karma” in China I heard a lot of “rich people just work harder or come from a great family” against all visible evidence.
Thats because the Western capitalist worldview has spread globally.
Many of these countries had more socialist systems after establishing their respective post colonial governments but embraced more protectionist strategies or had sanctions placed on them by the wealthiest (Western) nations for not playing ball with the neoliberal capitalist agenda.
Basically, the West stole from them for centuries through settler colonialism, left with the riches and then said ‘you better do things our way or we will refuse to do trade with you and you will continue to starve’
The world has had no choice to embrace it, for better or for worse.
Western capitalist mores are actively brainwashing us into thinking wealth is virtue. Might is right. It is not.
I think once you see how much damage colonization did it’s easy to blame everything on that one evil. But that’s oversimplifying to an extreme extent.
For example, I really doubt the idea of class based karma (or karma based class perhaps) was a colonial introduction to India. I’m not disagreeing with you that modern capitalism is bad or saying that colonialism wasn’t damaging, those are both true, but it’s pretty damn patronizing to says “they couldn’t have had bad socioeconomic practices without us” Hell they had a literal caste system of worker exploitation long before we showed up.
It was not a colonial based introduction but it was institutionalized by colonists.
I’m glad that we agree modern capitalism is problematic and the history of colonialism (and the modern Western world) is predicated on evil, exploitative, inhumane and non-egalitarian principles.
I didn’t say that they couldn’t have bad socioeconomic practices without [the West]. I simply stated that a forced assimilation to a capitalist worldview has occurred globally (the alternative being destitution) and which has reinforced the idea that wealth is virtue.
If we’re going to have an honest reflection on caste, we first need to acknowledge that the West treated all colored peoples as low caste for hundreds of years (and it still does in many ways through neocolonialism). Inequality is inherent to modern Western capitalist dogma, just as it is in a rigid institutionalized (courtesy of colonial legacy) caste based system.
I won’t deny that I am lazy (wealthy enough to not need to work for a few months a year), however I and almost everyone I know would much rather get that down to never needing to work. Capitalism has proven its ability to allow this for some people, social services would be amazing if there was enough capital behind them to enable their own self sustainability without requiring external revenue (aka surviving off the interest - inflation) so they could have a chance of working even if the majority of people rely on their services.
I think people are our own worse enemies at times. There are some countries that are less individualistic than the ones I’ve lived in, but there’s a “crabs in the bucket” mentality.
I was lectured by a coworker about how the poor have it better than us and how we provide for them but they have it better than us. Note that despite having this knowledge, my coworker still decides to earn a paycheck. People hate it when others get stuff for free. There is definitely a form of entitlement that some people can get. I know people that work in government (Canada) and they say those that get free benefits just act so mean about it and if things go wrong or are delayed.
Best I can do is militarized police
They’re not giving the police money. They’re giving the people who supply the police more money. Which are their people
More crime also means more slave labour and more equipment sales
doesn’t protect private property though because that money might give poor people strength and power and we can’t have the rubes having that now, can we? :(
To add some evidence (from a basic internet search, skimmed but not read in detail):
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/evidence-behind-putting-money-directly-pockets-poor
Thanks, bookmarking this
As always the real problem is laziness. Why create new systems when we can ad hoc the current system? Sure it was never meant to do that thing but our short term goals are way more important than any long term goal you can think of.
The reason no one in a suit cares is because most of the voting monkeys don’t care because they lack the capacity to understand.
