How liberals should argue crime issues
Clifford Olson died last week. If you are fortunate enough to have never heard of him, he was a serial killer.
A friend of mine used to edit the Solicitor General's correspondence to Clifford Olson. While he was in jail, Olson wrote to the SG quite regularly. I don't think my friend was supposed to tell me about this but the task was interesting and, in a way, amusing. You see, Canada is a good liberal country and, as such, we try to rehabilitate criminals rather than just punish them. Well, actually we don't seriously try to rehabilitate anyone (a point I'll get back to) but we like to pretend we do because that makes us feel better about ourselves. We pretend so hard that the laws and regulations governing the prison system give inmates what is, for all intents and purposes a right to rehabilitation. And Olson had figured this out and was attempting to use these laws and regulations to game the system.
And there lay the trick in the writing and editing of this correspondence. The letters couldn't tell the truth, which was that no one was even vaguely interested in rehabilitating Olson. They had to play the game. Anyway, the Olson's death got me thinking about liberals and crime. You see, if there is any issue where liberals consistently alienate voters they cannot afford to lose, it's crime. Conservatives, on the other hand, know that anytime they pass "tough on crime" legislation, that liberals will over-react and come across as strident, ineffectual wimps who have nothing better to do but coddle criminals.
And this will be true even if the legislation that conservatives are proposing is stupid, pointless and unfair. More often than not, the legislation is all those things.
This is a situation where everybody loses. New legislation should be subjected to serious debate and that will never happen until liberals learn to argue more effectively here. So, as a general public service, here is what you guys are doing wrong.
Bad argument #1: We don't need to do anything about crime because crime rates are going down.
This always gets trotted out like it's conclusive. Why would it be? Suppose I said, "Fewer and fewer people are dying of cancer so lets cut back on funding research". Or how about, "The number of wars has been steadily declining over the last century so let's stop making efforts to avoid wars". Would you expect anyone to buy that?
Don't even think this argument and never, ever, ever, say it out loud.
Crime is a problem even if there isn't much. To get a notion of this, imagine that there had only been one murder in the entire history of humanity. Would that diminish the social and political importance of that murder? No it would not. To the contrary, every school kid would be taught the story of that one murder. There is a reason why the story of Cain and Abel has such power.
And notice that Abel is a supremely non-compelling character. Nobody in the history of the world ever shed a tear for that wimp. The story's power has nothing to do with pity for the victim and everything to do with our deep fear of the crime. Much like we all have dreams of falling, we all fear murder even though the chances of it happening to us are incredibly slim.
The only desirable crime rate is zero and don't argue otherwise for you are arguing against human nature. You cannot win that argument, so stop trying.
Bad argument #2: Liberals are inconsistent on crime.
While the caricature is that liberals are soft on crime in general, the truth is that there are some sorts of crime that liberals are very hard on. Think of, for example, campus rape, sexual harassment and human rights violations. If you want a clear example of how tough-on-crime legislation can do serious damage, you could not come up with a better example than what happened with the crazy explosion of accusations of child sexual abuse in day care centers and schools back in the 1990s. Likewise you might have a look at the people whose lives were ruined by "memories" of sexual abuse from early childhood supposedly "recovered" during therapy. A lot of liberals pushed very hard to have bad laws passed and prosecuted in these areas in a rush to judgment that has more than a passing resemblance to the Salem witch trials when looked at in hindsight.
And notice what is happening here. If you are an upper-middle class person with a college education (and most liberals are), the odds of your being a victim of violent crime or even theft are pretty slim. And even if you are a victim of theft, it won't have that serious an impact on you. Unless you fall victim of a Bernie Madoff, the chances of someone stealing enough from you to really hurt are slim. The kinds of crime that liberals are reflexively hard on just happen to be the kinds of crimes liberals most fear. The crimes they don't want to be hard on just happen to be the crime that the poor and the lower middle class fear most.
The Bernie Madoff case underlines this. You don't find many examples of liberals worrying that Madoff will be subjected to too harsh a punishment. Quite the contrary, when people like Bernie Madoff, Conrad Black and Ken Lay get charged, liberals fantasize about seeing them dehumanized by the justice system.
If you ever want to see just how much damage a crime like theft or vandalism can do, visit a poor neighbourhood where people are most vulnerable to these crimes. Visit a neighbourhood where people hesitate to buy the things they really want because they think these things will just be stolen from them. Visit a neighbourhood where no one puts any effort into giving their house or business any curb appeal because the odds of someone coming along and spray painting it are pretty high.
Bad argument #3: Thinking that the only thing that matters is the actual crimes
Again, liberals have no problem seeing the problem with issues such as campus rape or human rights. With campus rape, we all grasp that the problem is not just the relatively small and declining number of women who actually get raped. We all grasp that it affects the quality of life of all women on campus that they have to fear this happening to them. We also grasp that a relatively small number of human rights abuses will tend affect thousands more people who are not directly subjected to the abuse.
And yet, with violent crime and theft, we forget this.
And anyone who comes from a tough neighbourhood can also tell you that violent criminals are very economic with their violence. There is a multiplier effect for violence and this is something even the stupidest schoolyard bully can figure out. The damage done here is much more extensive than the convict-able crimes.
By treating some crimes as more serious than others, liberals are, whether they realize it or not, really sending a message that some victims matter more than others. This is a mind-boggling stupid thing to so when you are trying to win votes from an aging population.
Bad argument #4: Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation is not the alternative. Look, if you seriously claim to be arguing based on facts, then you cannot even begin to pretend that there is anything that even looks like compelling evidence that rehabilitation works.
And if liberals really cared even the remotest bit about the welfare of convicted criminals, we'd be hearing about prison rape every single day. We don't.
Put the two together and you can begin to see a massive weakness in the liberal position. There is a government monopoly at work here and it is a government monopoly that is heavily unionized. The same people whose jobs depend on the maintenance of ineffective rehabilitation programs are also the one who do such a poor job of protecting inmates from violent, dehumanizing crimes such as rape at the hands of other inmates. These are the people who need to be held accountable if you honestly claim to want to help criminals turn their lives around and the sad truth is that liberals are doing less than nothing to enure there is accountability here.
The real liberal position
The thing about all these bad arguments is that they all stem from the same root problem: liberals are not willing to be honest with themselves or others about what they really believe. The real liberal stance is not that being tough on crime will be ineffective or hurt criminals. The real liberal position is that they are perfectly willing to tolerate a certain level of certain types of crime.
Liberals will, for example, argue that the war on drugs is pointless and that people are being pointlessly hurt by it and there is some merit to those arguments. But the truth is that liberals are in favour of recreational drug use. As I've pointed out before, arguments about legalization of marijuana are never about what the people who make them really want. Legalization advocates talk about the cost of enforcement, they talk about the benefits to people with terminal diseases and they talk about all the useful clothing, paper and other products that can be made from hemp. They never acknowledge that the real point of their arguments is they they want the right to sit around and get blasted.
Likewise, liberals rail against efforts to be tough on thieves because the truth is that liberals want to weaken legal protections on property rights generally (with the singular exception of intellectual property rights which, for obvious reasons of self interest, they want to see toughened).
Likewise, liberals are not terribly keen about doing anything about youth gangs made up of visible minorities because they believe these gangs are a regrettable but understandable response to racism.
And I could keep going and going. But I think this is enough to make the point that what liberals believe to be a reasoned and principled stand on crime is actually a mass of self-interest and prejudice.
What should liberals do about it? Well, you have two choices. You could simply be pragmatic and ask yourself what sort of positions are most likely to get you votes. If you do that, you will essentially adopt the conservative tough-on-crime stance. That would work.
The other alternative is that you could develop a genuinely principled position. That would mean taking on some very solidly entrenched interests in the judicial community as well as the public service unions. It may or may not work. No one has ever tried it before so it is hard to say.
Good luck.
Clifford Olson died last week. If you are fortunate enough to have never heard of him, he was a serial killer.
A friend of mine used to edit the Solicitor General's correspondence to Clifford Olson. While he was in jail, Olson wrote to the SG quite regularly. I don't think my friend was supposed to tell me about this but the task was interesting and, in a way, amusing. You see, Canada is a good liberal country and, as such, we try to rehabilitate criminals rather than just punish them. Well, actually we don't seriously try to rehabilitate anyone (a point I'll get back to) but we like to pretend we do because that makes us feel better about ourselves. We pretend so hard that the laws and regulations governing the prison system give inmates what is, for all intents and purposes a right to rehabilitation. And Olson had figured this out and was attempting to use these laws and regulations to game the system.
And there lay the trick in the writing and editing of this correspondence. The letters couldn't tell the truth, which was that no one was even vaguely interested in rehabilitating Olson. They had to play the game. Anyway, the Olson's death got me thinking about liberals and crime. You see, if there is any issue where liberals consistently alienate voters they cannot afford to lose, it's crime. Conservatives, on the other hand, know that anytime they pass "tough on crime" legislation, that liberals will over-react and come across as strident, ineffectual wimps who have nothing better to do but coddle criminals.
And this will be true even if the legislation that conservatives are proposing is stupid, pointless and unfair. More often than not, the legislation is all those things.
This is a situation where everybody loses. New legislation should be subjected to serious debate and that will never happen until liberals learn to argue more effectively here. So, as a general public service, here is what you guys are doing wrong.
Bad argument #1: We don't need to do anything about crime because crime rates are going down.
This always gets trotted out like it's conclusive. Why would it be? Suppose I said, "Fewer and fewer people are dying of cancer so lets cut back on funding research". Or how about, "The number of wars has been steadily declining over the last century so let's stop making efforts to avoid wars". Would you expect anyone to buy that?
Don't even think this argument and never, ever, ever, say it out loud.
Crime is a problem even if there isn't much. To get a notion of this, imagine that there had only been one murder in the entire history of humanity. Would that diminish the social and political importance of that murder? No it would not. To the contrary, every school kid would be taught the story of that one murder. There is a reason why the story of Cain and Abel has such power.
And notice that Abel is a supremely non-compelling character. Nobody in the history of the world ever shed a tear for that wimp. The story's power has nothing to do with pity for the victim and everything to do with our deep fear of the crime. Much like we all have dreams of falling, we all fear murder even though the chances of it happening to us are incredibly slim.
The only desirable crime rate is zero and don't argue otherwise for you are arguing against human nature. You cannot win that argument, so stop trying.
Bad argument #2: Liberals are inconsistent on crime.
While the caricature is that liberals are soft on crime in general, the truth is that there are some sorts of crime that liberals are very hard on. Think of, for example, campus rape, sexual harassment and human rights violations. If you want a clear example of how tough-on-crime legislation can do serious damage, you could not come up with a better example than what happened with the crazy explosion of accusations of child sexual abuse in day care centers and schools back in the 1990s. Likewise you might have a look at the people whose lives were ruined by "memories" of sexual abuse from early childhood supposedly "recovered" during therapy. A lot of liberals pushed very hard to have bad laws passed and prosecuted in these areas in a rush to judgment that has more than a passing resemblance to the Salem witch trials when looked at in hindsight.
And notice what is happening here. If you are an upper-middle class person with a college education (and most liberals are), the odds of your being a victim of violent crime or even theft are pretty slim. And even if you are a victim of theft, it won't have that serious an impact on you. Unless you fall victim of a Bernie Madoff, the chances of someone stealing enough from you to really hurt are slim. The kinds of crime that liberals are reflexively hard on just happen to be the kinds of crimes liberals most fear. The crimes they don't want to be hard on just happen to be the crime that the poor and the lower middle class fear most.
The Bernie Madoff case underlines this. You don't find many examples of liberals worrying that Madoff will be subjected to too harsh a punishment. Quite the contrary, when people like Bernie Madoff, Conrad Black and Ken Lay get charged, liberals fantasize about seeing them dehumanized by the justice system.
If you ever want to see just how much damage a crime like theft or vandalism can do, visit a poor neighbourhood where people are most vulnerable to these crimes. Visit a neighbourhood where people hesitate to buy the things they really want because they think these things will just be stolen from them. Visit a neighbourhood where no one puts any effort into giving their house or business any curb appeal because the odds of someone coming along and spray painting it are pretty high.
Bad argument #3: Thinking that the only thing that matters is the actual crimes
Again, liberals have no problem seeing the problem with issues such as campus rape or human rights. With campus rape, we all grasp that the problem is not just the relatively small and declining number of women who actually get raped. We all grasp that it affects the quality of life of all women on campus that they have to fear this happening to them. We also grasp that a relatively small number of human rights abuses will tend affect thousands more people who are not directly subjected to the abuse.
And yet, with violent crime and theft, we forget this.
And anyone who comes from a tough neighbourhood can also tell you that violent criminals are very economic with their violence. There is a multiplier effect for violence and this is something even the stupidest schoolyard bully can figure out. The damage done here is much more extensive than the convict-able crimes.
By treating some crimes as more serious than others, liberals are, whether they realize it or not, really sending a message that some victims matter more than others. This is a mind-boggling stupid thing to so when you are trying to win votes from an aging population.
Bad argument #4: Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation is not the alternative. Look, if you seriously claim to be arguing based on facts, then you cannot even begin to pretend that there is anything that even looks like compelling evidence that rehabilitation works.
And if liberals really cared even the remotest bit about the welfare of convicted criminals, we'd be hearing about prison rape every single day. We don't.
Put the two together and you can begin to see a massive weakness in the liberal position. There is a government monopoly at work here and it is a government monopoly that is heavily unionized. The same people whose jobs depend on the maintenance of ineffective rehabilitation programs are also the one who do such a poor job of protecting inmates from violent, dehumanizing crimes such as rape at the hands of other inmates. These are the people who need to be held accountable if you honestly claim to want to help criminals turn their lives around and the sad truth is that liberals are doing less than nothing to enure there is accountability here.
The real liberal position
The thing about all these bad arguments is that they all stem from the same root problem: liberals are not willing to be honest with themselves or others about what they really believe. The real liberal stance is not that being tough on crime will be ineffective or hurt criminals. The real liberal position is that they are perfectly willing to tolerate a certain level of certain types of crime.
Liberals will, for example, argue that the war on drugs is pointless and that people are being pointlessly hurt by it and there is some merit to those arguments. But the truth is that liberals are in favour of recreational drug use. As I've pointed out before, arguments about legalization of marijuana are never about what the people who make them really want. Legalization advocates talk about the cost of enforcement, they talk about the benefits to people with terminal diseases and they talk about all the useful clothing, paper and other products that can be made from hemp. They never acknowledge that the real point of their arguments is they they want the right to sit around and get blasted.
Likewise, liberals rail against efforts to be tough on thieves because the truth is that liberals want to weaken legal protections on property rights generally (with the singular exception of intellectual property rights which, for obvious reasons of self interest, they want to see toughened).
Likewise, liberals are not terribly keen about doing anything about youth gangs made up of visible minorities because they believe these gangs are a regrettable but understandable response to racism.
And I could keep going and going. But I think this is enough to make the point that what liberals believe to be a reasoned and principled stand on crime is actually a mass of self-interest and prejudice.
What should liberals do about it? Well, you have two choices. You could simply be pragmatic and ask yourself what sort of positions are most likely to get you votes. If you do that, you will essentially adopt the conservative tough-on-crime stance. That would work.
The other alternative is that you could develop a genuinely principled position. That would mean taking on some very solidly entrenched interests in the judicial community as well as the public service unions. It may or may not work. No one has ever tried it before so it is hard to say.
Good luck.
I'm not a liberal, but how about complete legalization of hard drugs while possession/use of pot results in a trial-free on-the-spot execution? Gets rid of most of the bad effects of the drug war while maintaining a tough on crime posture.
ReplyDeleteWell, it would be interesting to put the suggestion forward just to see who could and couldn't come up with a coherent argument for or against it.
ReplyDelete